Derek Parfit famously defends a number of surprising views about "fission." One is that, in such a scenario, it is indeterminate whether I have survived or not. Another is that the fission case shows that it does not matter, in itself, whether I survive or not. Most critics of the first view contend that fission makes me cease to exist. Most opponents of the second view contend that fission does not preserve everything that matters in ordinary survival. In this paper (...) I shall provide a critique that does not rely on either of these contentions. There are other, interrelated reasons to reject Parfit's defense of the two theses. In particular, the availability of the following view creates trouble for Parfit: I determinately survive fission, but it is indeterminate which fission product I am. (shrink)

La teoría de la identidad personal, añadida por Locke a la segunda edición de su Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano, presenta una caracterización ontológica ambigua de la naturaleza de las personas. Por un lado, pareciera que las personas no pueden ser caracterizadas como sustancias. Por otro, sin embargo, la única alternativa disponible -es decir, la que las caracteriza como modos- no es totalmente satisfactoria. Se podría considerar a las personas como correspondientes a una simple actitud pragmática de los hombres en (...) relación con ellos mismos, pero esta alternativa tampoco está exenta de problemas. Este artículo propone que el mejor abordaje del texto no es intentar determinar lo que Locke realmente quiso decir, corrigiendo de alguna manera lo que escribió, sino considerar estas ambigüedades como un índice de una posición filosófica positiva. The theory on personal identity, added by Locke in the second edition of his Essay on Human Understanding, displays a dubious characterization on the nature of persons. In the one hand, it seems that persons can not be characterized as substances. But, on the other hand, the only available alternative - viz., to characterize them as modes - is not entirely satisfactory either. One could say that there is a possibility left, that of considering persons as the correspondents of a mere pragmatic attitude men take in relation to themselves, but unfortunately this alternative is also subjected to some serious problems. Taking into consideration these difficulties, this paper proposes that the best account of the text is not to undertake a determination of what Locke really wanted to say, emending in some way his writing, but rather to consider these ambiguities as the sign of a positive philosophical position. (shrink)

We consider an approach to some philosophical problems that I call the Method of Conceptual Articulation: to recognize that a question may lack any determinate answer, and to re-engineer concepts so that the question acquires a definite answer in such a way as to serve the epistemic motivations behind the question. As a case study we examine “Galileo’s Paradox”, that the perfect square numbers seem to be at once as numerous as the whole numbers, by one-to-one correspondence, and yet less (...) numerous, being a proper subset. I argue that Cantor resolved this paradox by a method at least close to that proposed—not by discovering the true nature of cardinal number, but by articulating several useful and appealing extensions of number to the infinite. Galileo was right to suggest that the concept of relative size did not apply to the infinite, for the concept he possessed did not. Nor was Bolzano simply wrong to reject Hume’s Principle (that one-to-one correspondence implies equal number) in the infinitary case, in favor of Euclid’s Common Notion 5 (that the whole is greater than the part), for the concept of cardinal number (in the sense of “number of elements”) was not clearly defined for infinite collections. Order extension theorems now suggest that a theory of cardinality upholding Euclid’s principle instead of Hume’s is possible. Cantor’s refinements of number are not the only ones possible, and they appear to have been shaped by motivations and fruitfulness, for they evolved in discernible stages correlated with emerging applications and results. Galileo, Bolzano, and Cantor shared interests in the particulate analysis of the continuum and in physical applications. Cantor’s concepts proved fruitful for those pursuits. Finally, Gödel was mistaken to claim that Cantor’s concept of cardinality is forced on us; though Gödel gives an intuitively compelling argument, he ignores the fact that Euclid’s Common Notion is also intuitively compelling, and we are therefore forced to make a choice. The success of Cantor’s concept of cardinality lies not in its truth (for concepts are not true or false), nor its uniqueness (for it is not the only extension of number possible), but in its intuitive appeal, and most of all, its usefulness to the understanding. (shrink)