Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

John L ocke ( Locke, 1690 ) distinguishes between two kinds of bodies: mere masses of matter and living bodies. These kinds are distinguished from each other and from persons by way of their persistence conditions. What it takes for a person to survive, for a person at one time to be identical to some person that exists at a later time, is for there to be a continuity of consciousness between the earlier person and the later one. In contrast, a living body can survive a change of parts without any consciousness being present, so long as that change is in accordance with the kind of diachronic organization that would be considered a single life. Masses, on the other hand, cannot survive any gain or loss of parts. What it is to be a given mass is just to be that collection of that stuff. A collection of different stuff is, therefore, a different mass. So says Locke. The intuition behind Locke's identity conditions for masses is that they are mere masses; all there is to such an object is the matter that composes it. If we are to respect this “mereness”, there seems no principled reason for placing any restrictions on which collections of matter should count as objects. Any collection of matter, no matter how arbitrarily grouped, has just as much claim to being a mass as any other collection. If we view the world four-dimensionally, as I prefer, the grouping of matter along the ... log in or subscribe to read full text