Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Identity and Existence in Logic' and 'New Essays on Human Understanding'

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2 ideas

9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 7. Indiscernible Objects
No two things are totally identical [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: By virtue of insensible variations, two individual things can never be perfectly alike.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref)
     A reaction: This sounds a bit like the 'discernibility of non-identicals', except that he says that the differences may not be 'sensible'. He has to be talking of physical things, since I presume that, say, the symmetry of two circles is perfectly identical.
The notion of 'property' is unclear for a logical version of the Identity of Indiscernibles [Anderson,CA]
     Full Idea: In the Identity of Indiscernibles, one speaks about properties, and the notion of a property is by no means clearly fixed and formalized in modern symbolic logic.
     From: C. Anthony Anderson (Identity and Existence in Logic [2014], 1.5)
     A reaction: The unclarity of 'property' is a bee in my philosophical bonnet, in speech, and in metaphysics, as well as in logic. It may well be the central problem in our attempts to understand the world in general terms. He cites intensional logic as promising.