13590
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Essences can make sense in a particular context or enquiry, as the most basic predicates [Quine]
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Full Idea:
The notion of essence makes sense in context. Relative to a particular enquiry, some predicates may play a more basic role than others, or may apply more fixedly; and these may be treated as essential.
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From:
Willard Quine (Intensions Revisited [1977], p.121)
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A reaction:
Quine has got a bad press on essentialism, and on modal logic, but I take this point seriously. If you give something a fixed identity by means of essence in some context, you can then go ahead and apply possible world reasoning in that context.
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1350
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Continuity is needed for existence, otherwise we would say a thing existed after it ceased to exist [Reid]
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Full Idea:
Identity supposes an uninterrupted continuance of existence….Otherwise we must suppose a being to exist after it has ceased to exist, and to have existed before it was produced, which are manifest contradictions.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 3: Memory [1785], III.Ch 4)
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A reaction:
I take the point to be that if something is supposed to survive a gap in its existence, that must imply that it somehow exists during the gap. If a light flashes on and off, is it really a new entity each time?
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21322
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We treat slowly changing things as identical for the sake of economy in language [Reid]
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Full Idea:
All bodies, as they consist of innumerable parts, are subject to continual changes of their substance. When such changes are gradual, because language could not afford a different name for each state, it retains the same name and is considered the same.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 3: Memory [1785], III.Ch 4)
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A reaction:
This is hard to deny. We could hardly rename a child each morning. Simlarly, we can't have a unique name for each leaf on a tree. Economy of language explains a huge amount in philosophy.
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