Volume 10, Issue 1

The paper distinguishes between five questions often discussed under the heading “personal identity.” One of these questions is “What am I fundamentally?” The animalist answer to this question is “I am fundamentally a human being.” According to this answer, each of us is fundamentally an entity, of which only one can exist in a single human body. In contrast, this paper argues for the following thesis (the coexistence thesis): each of us is fundamentally an entity, of which there could exist two or more in one body. In addition, this paper offers a criterion of individuation for such entities. The coexistence thesis is a radical thesis: It does not merely say that I—each one of us—could have more than one personality. Rather, stated bluntly, the thesis is that there could be more than one “I” in a single human body.

In Mind and World, John McDowell tries to achieve a reconciliation between reason and nature. In his view, this pursuit derives its motivation from the modern conception of nature as the space of law, which seems to relegate human rationality to a state of utter isolation from man's nature as an animal. Accordingly, we need to rethink the modern understanding of nature in such a way as to make room for a notion of “second nature”, in which human reason may properly be situated. In this article I argue, from a phenomenological point of view, that McDowell's proposed solution to the problem of dualism is unsatisfactory, basically because it seeks to combine two radically different perspectives on experience: as a vehicle of reasons and meaning and as a transaction in nature respectively. But, it is suggested, that kind of reconciliation is neither possible, nor even desirable. At bottom, it rests on a confusion of transcendental with metaphysical issues.

It has been argued that the tenseless view of time is incompatible with endurantism. This has been disputed, perhaps most famously by Hugh Mellor and Peter Simons. They argue that things can endure in tenseless time, and indeed must endure if tenseless time is to contain change. In this paper I will point out some difficulties with Mellor's and Simons' claims that in tenseless time a particular can be ‘wholly present’ at various times, and therefore endure, as well as have incompatible properties at those different times, and thereby change. In effect I argue that they do not resolve the charge that the tenseless view of time is incomatible with endurantism because the tenseless view does not allow anything to change temporal location and thereby come to be ‘wholly present’ at various times.

It has been argued that philosophers that base their theories of meaning on communicative intentions and language conventions cannot accommodate the fact that natural languages are compositional. In this paper I show that if we pay careful attention to Grice's notion of “resultant procedures” we see that this is not the case. The argument, if we leave out all the technicalities, is fairly simple. Resultant procedures tell you how to combine utterance parts, like words, into larger units, like sentences. You cannot have that unless you have R-correlations (reference) and D-correlations (denotation). These in turn, the argument goes, depend on communicative intentions, since without communicative intentions any attempt to R-correlate or D-correlate a word with an object or sets of objects would inevitably result in correlation-relations between that word and everything that exists. In other words, without communicative intentions in the equation it would turn out that every time we speak, we inevitably speak about everything, but clearly we do not. So communicative intentions, instead of being nebulous things that are in possible conflict with the Principle of Compositionality, are in fact a prerequisite for that very principle.

By what criteria can an empathetic interpreter justify the inference from the fact that, when simulating another person, he himself forms such-and-such intentions to act in the imagined situation, to the supposed fact that the person simulated formed or will form the same intentions? It is suggested that the interpreter determines this by normatively assessing the reasons for and against the action, simply following his own subjective or perspective-dependent criteria for what is reasonable to believe, desire, and do in the given situation. If the interpreter finds the other's action to be well-motivated, this is indication that the interpreter shares the perspective of the other, and hence that the explanation is valid. In Hans-Georg Gadamer's words: understanding is, primarily, agreement. A possible objection is that this turns interpretation into something purely subjective and relative. It is argued that the relativity involved is harmless and does not imply relativism in any important sense.

A striking feature of contemporary thought, mainly due to the Kripke-Putnam theory of reference, is the rehabilitation of the notion of ‘essence’. Salmon (Reference and Essence, Blackwell Press, 1982) has convincingly argued that this revival of essentialism is completely unjustified. This paper tries to determine why, if this is so unjustified, essentialism and reference became entangled. It is argued that this is due to the ‘instance-to-kind’ logic of the determination of reference used by the new theory of reference. It is also argued that such theories that try to avoid essentialist commitments can do so, but only at a cost of sacrificing some basic virtues of the new theory of reference.