Episode 2 - Identity
https://soundcloud.com/https%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fwell-named%2F5-minute-philosophy-episode-2-identity
Continuing on with my motto that there are two types of philosophical questions: ones that can be presented as the opposition between two positions, and ones that can't. (I only tackle the ones that can).
- The show deals in great part with a contrast between a view of personal identity modeled after
Leibniz' Identity of Indiscernables, which casts the identity of any given thing as the specific difference between it and other things, i.e its uniqueness, and a view modeled after the
Greek philosophical idea of "essence", owing to Plato and Aristotle primarily.
- I called the essentialist view "existential" as a hat tip towards later existentialist philosophy, which dealt with questions of personal identity in a way that I think flows from this sort of idea of identity that is not a matter of difference, but a matter of "being" what one really is. Kierkegaard, as an example, spoke of the "singularity" of a person. In religious contexts, existentialism tends towards that sort of emphasis of the value of each person regardless of what they do. That their value is in saying "I am", rather than "I am
this" or "I am
that".
- Democritus is known as an early greek thinker, along with Leucippus, whose views of an "atomistic" universe, i.e a nature formed of composites of simpler parts, turned out to be a much better view of the world than the competing systems of the times, whether of elements (water, fire, etc) or essentialisms (the essence of "tree", so to speak). See here:
Democritus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- In mentioning Buddhist philosophy, I was referring to the ideas of
Anatta and
Anicca, that is, "no-self", and "impermanence". There is a connection to Buddhist "metaphysics" (that might be the wrong word) that deals not in essences but in the inter-independence of everything:
Pratītyasamutpāda.
- A paradox of identity in the "analytic" view, owing to
Eubulides: Socrates knows Euclides. However, when Euclides puts on a disguise, Socrates doesn't recognize him. Yet, Euclides may be said to have the property of being known by Socrates, so if the masked figure does not have the property of being known by Socrates, does that mean that he is
not Euclides? Along similar lines, but with temporal change as suggested in the segment, Heraclitus remarked that you can never step into the same river twice. Related to these are the paradoxes of material composition:
Material Constitution (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Aristotle had an interesting view of "soul" which was not essentialistic:
"Remember that first actuality is a kind of potentiality -a capacity to engage in the activity which is the corresponding second actuality. So soul is a capacity - but a capacity to do what?
A living thing’s soul is its capacity to engage in the activities that are characteristic of living things of its natural kind. What are those activities? Some are listed in DA II.1; others in DA II.2:
- Self-nourishment
- Growth
- Decay
- Movement and rest (in respect of place)
- Perception
- Intellect
So anything that nourishes itself, that grows, decays, moves about (on its own, not just when moved by something else), perceives, or thinks is alive. And the capacities of a thing in virtue of which it does these things constitute its soul." --
Aristotle on the Soul
It's useful to remember that Psyche in pre-Christian Greek philosophy didn't have the same connotation of an immaterial substance as it later took on, but was also something of a synonym for life, although the difficulty with the term and its meaning is very closely related to the difficulty with identity along the lines presented here.
This thread might be an act of pure egoism.
