display all the ideas for this combination of texts
6 ideas
| 6056 | Identity is not a relation between objects [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: It is self-evident that identity is not a relation between objects. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 5.5301) | |
| A reaction: Part of Wittgenstein's claim that identity statements are 'pseudo-propositions'. See, in reply, the ideas of McGinn on identity. This was part of the drive that led to the extremes of logical positivism, killing metaphysics for two generations. |
| 22322 | You can't define identity by same predicates, because two objects with same predicates is assertable [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Russell's definition of identity [x is y if any predicate of x is a predicate of y] won't do, because then one cannot say that two objects have all their properties in common | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 5.5302), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 53 'Ident' | |
| A reaction: [The Russell is in Principia] Good. Even if Leibniz is right that no two obejcts have identical properties, it is at least meaningful to consider the possibility. Russell makes it an impossibility, rather than a contingent fact. |
| 6057 | Two things can't be identical, and self-identity is an empty concept [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 5.5303) | |
| A reaction: Wittgenstein's attack on identity. It is best (following McGinn) to only speak of resemblance between two things (possibly to a very high degree, as in two electrons). Self-identity just is identity; you can drop the word 'identity', but not the concept. |
| 17036 | Identity statements can be contingent if they rely on descriptions [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: If the man who invented bifocals was the first Postmaster General of the United States - that they were one and the same - it's contingently true. …So when you make identity statements using descriptions, that can be a contingent fact. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity lectures [1970], Lecture 2) |
| 15847 | Two things relate either as same or different, or part of a whole, or the whole of the part [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Everything is surely related to everything as follows: either it is the same or different; or, if it is not the same or different, it would be related as part to whole or as whole to part. | |
| From: Plato (Parmenides [c.364 BCE], 146b) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a really helpful first step in trying to analyse the nature of identity. Two things are either two or (actually) one, or related mereologically. |
| 17038 | If Hesperus and Phosophorus are the same, they can't possibly be different [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: If Hesperus and Phosphorus are one and the same, then in no other possible world can they be different. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity lectures [1970], Lecture 2) | |
| A reaction: If we ask whether one object could possibly be two objects, and deny that possibility, then Kripke's novel thought seems just right and obvious. |