Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Emile: treatise on education' and 'Identity'

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2 ideas

9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 4. Four-Dimensionalism
I could have died at five, but the summation of my adult stages could not [Noonan]
     Full Idea: Persons have different modal properties from the summations of person-stages. …I might have died when I was five. But the maximal summation of person-stages which perdurantists say is me could not have had a temporal extent of a mere five years.
     From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §5)
     A reaction: Thus the summation of stages seems to fail Leibniz's Law, since truths about a part are not true of the whole. But my foot might be amputated without me being amputated. The objection is the fallacy of composition?
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 5. Temporal Parts
Stage theorists accept four-dimensionalism, but call each stage a whole object [Noonan]
     Full Idea: Stage theorists, accepting the ontology of perdurance, modify the semantics to secure the result that fatness is a property of a cat. Every temporal part of a cat (such as Tabby-on-Monday) is a cat. …(but they pay a price over the counting of cats).
     From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §5)
     A reaction: [Noonan cites Hawley and Sider for this view. The final parenthesis compresses Noonan] I would take the difficulty over counting cats to be fatal to the view. It produces too many cats, or too few, or denies counting altogether.