It is a philosophical commonplace that quantification involves, invokes, or presupposes, the relation of identity. There seem to be two major sources for this belief: the conviction that identity is implicated in the phenomenon of bound variable recurrence within the scope of a quantifier; memories of Quine’s insistence that quantification requires absolute identity for the values of variables. With respect to, I show that the only extant argument for a dependence of variable recurrence on identity, due to John Hawthorne, fails. (...) I further show that the function of variable recurrence is not subsumed under that of identity, so that a dependence of the former on the latter, if any, would have to be of a rather indirect nature. With respect to, I argue that the relevant passage in Quine fails to establish a connection between quantification and the identity relation, and indeed wasn’t intended by Quine to do so. (shrink)

Simple mass nouns are words like ‘water’, ‘furniture’ and ‘gold’. We can form complex mass noun phrases such as ‘dirty water’, ‘leaded gold’ and ‘green grass’. I do not propose to discuss the problems in giving a characterization of the words that are mass versus those that are not. For the purposes of this paper I shall make the following decrees: (a) nothing that is not a noun or noun phrase can be mass, (b) no abstract noun phrases are considered (...) mass, (c) words like ‘thing’, ‘entity’ and ‘object’ are not mass, (d) I shall not consider such words as ‘stuff’, ‘substance or ‘matter’, (e) measures on mass nouns (like ‘gallon of gasoline’, ‘blade of grass’, etc.) are not considered, (f) plurals of count terms are not considered mass. Within these limitations, we can say generally that mass noun phrases are those phrases that ‘much’ can be prefexed to, by ‘many’ cannot be prefexed to, without an0maly.l Semantically, such phrases usually have the property of collectiveness- they are true of any sum of things of which they are true ; and of divisiveness - they are true of any part (down to a certain limit) of things of which they are true. All of this, however, is only ‘generally speaking’ - I shall mostly use only the simple examples given above and ignore the problems in giving a complete characterization of mass nouns. In the paper I want to discuss some problems involved in casting English sentences containing mass nouns into some artificial language; but in order to do this we should have some anchoring framework on which to justify or reject a given proposal. The problem of finding an adequate language can be viewed as a case of translation (from English to the artificial language), where the translation relation must meet certain requirements. I shall suggest five such requirements; others could be added. (shrink)

Geach's account of the Aristotelian logic of categorical sentences supplemented the views shared by Frege, Russell, Quine and others. I argue that this particular predicate logic approach and Geach's points apply to only one variety of natural language categorical sentences. For example, it takes the universal categorical as a universal conditional “If anything is a man, then it is mortal”. A different natural language form can and should be invoked: “Every man is a mortal.” Employing special restricted quantifiers in a (...) version of predicate logic, we justify a full square of opposition and the rules of quality and quantity that Geach rejected. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the philosophical consequences of one tradition in Trinitarian theology, which emphasizes that each of the persons of the Trinity is wholly God. I pay special attention to Leftow’s claim that the persons of the Godhead must be divine in the same sense of the word ‘divine’ as the Godhead itself. I argue that the existing philosophical account of the Trinity which best captures this view is what I have termed the ‘Strong Theory of Relative Identity,’ (...) first proposed Peter Geach. I then develop what I take to be the most pressing objection to this account of the Trinity, namely that it cannot be supplemented with a coherent model-theoretic semantics. I end with a suggestion for responding to this objection. (shrink)

Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes act as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as 'Socrates’ wisdom' or 'the beauty of the landscape'. This paper argues that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of bare demonstratives like 'this' and 'that' in what in linguistics is called identificational sentences.

In this paper, I defend Peter Geach’s theory of Relative Identity against the charge that it cannot make sense of basic semantic notions.

Based on the notion of a trope, this paper gives a novel analysis of identificational sentences such as 'this is Mary','this is a beautiful woman', 'this looks like Mary', or 'this is the same lump of clay, but not the same statue as that'.

"Matter" may be defined, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "The substance, or the substances collectively, out of which a physical object is made or of which it consists". And while the O.E.D. is not the ultimate authority on words, nor is it, I believe, far wrong in this particular case. The definition is, as I shall argue in this paper, in substantial harmony with a tradition of some antiquity, according to which material objects do not constitute a somehow (...) 'fundamental category' for ontology; and it is in conflict with a more contemporary view which maintains precisely that they do. (shrink)

Příspěvek hodlá zkoumat některé filozofické předpoklady a důsledky tzv. sortální identity. Téma sortálů si vysloužilo pozornost filozofů od 60. let především v souvislosti s knihou P. Geache Reference and Generality. Témata identity, její případné závislosti na určitých predikátech a zejména otázka kritérií identity se následně stala předmětem intenzivní filozofické debaty. V této souvislosti budou nastíněna různá pojetí sortálů. Filozofický význam sortálů spočívá především v otázce individuace a (re)identifikace objektů. Mezi sortálními teoretiky se především rozhořela debata, zda jsou s individui některé (...) sortály spojeny nutně, tj. jestli platí, že pokud individuum spadá pod nějaký sortál, pak nemůže spadat pod jiný. Pozitivní odpověď zakládá klasický aristotelský esencialismus, k záporné odpovědi směřují antiesencialisté. V sortální logice se navíc poměrně často buduje hierarchie sortálů, kdy sortály mohou (příp. musí) být ve vztahu podřazenosti k jinému sortálu a lze dokonce uvažovat o případném nejvyšším sortálu jakožto sortálu, který již není podřízen žádnému jinému. Zde se přímo nabízí souvislost s aristotelskou hierarchií kategorií, analogie s touto naukou budou předmětem závěrečného srovnání. (shrink)

Cognitive partitions are useful. The notion of numerical identity helps us induce them. Consider, for instance, the role of identity in representing an equivalence relation like taking the same train. This expressive function of identity has been largely overlooked. Other possible functions of the concept have been over-emphasized. It is not clear that we use identity to represent individual objects or quantify over collections of them. Understanding what the concept is good for looks especially urgent in light of the fact (...) that numerical identities themselves are tangibly trifling. (shrink)