This paper defends the view of continuants as 'four-dimensional worms' against an argument of Geach's. This is to the effect that if continuants are four-dimensional worms then their stages either do, or do not, fall under the very general terms satisfied by the continuants themselves (a stage of a man either is, or is not, a man); but that either alternative is untenable. I try to show how the former alternative may be defended by appealing to some of Geach's own (...) ideas about identity; then go on to defend the four-dimensionalist view from a criticism of it by Mellor, and finish with an account of the intuitive distinction between process and continuant terms. (shrink)

The paper argues that one distinction between concrete count nouns and concrete mass nouns is that geach's derelativization thesis is valid for the former but not valid for the latter. That is, Where 'f' is a concrete count noun 'x is (an) f' means 'for some y, X is the same f as y', But where 'f' is a concrete mass noun this is not so; rather, In this case, 'x is f' is tantamount to 'for some y, X is (...) the f of y'. It is further suggested that abstract nouns are in this respect to be grouped with concrete mass nouns. (shrink)

In the October 1978 issue of Mind, Nicholas Griffin puts forward a criticism of one of my arguments in 'Wiggins on Identity'. Although I would not now wish to defend everything I said in that paper, the argument Griffin attacks still seems to me to be a good one. In what follows, I explain why I think his criticism fails to strike home.

In One Priest argues for the contradictoriness of Unity. The argument is that the unity of complex things is contradictory. It is contradictory that there are complex wholes composed of many parts. But there are. Thus, the explanation of unity has to be a contradictory entity, a gluon, which both is and is not an object. The book then develops and utilises a theory of gluons. The argument for the contradictoriness of Unity is crucial; without it there is no motivation (...) for the theory of gluons. It fails. It does so because ‘because’ is a sentential connective. So what follows it must be a sentence, not a list. So Priest is wrong to say that in a complex whole there must be something, an entity, which binds the parts together. (shrink)

David Hume was one of the most important British philosophers of the eighteenth century. The first part of his Treatise on Human Nature is a seminal work in philosophy. Hume on Knowledge introduces and assesses: * Humes life and the background of the Treatise * The ideas and text in the Treatise * Humes continuing importance to philosophy.