It no longer is true in a metaphorical sense only that a person can have a change of heart. We might grant this much — allow that a person may have one heart at one time and have another heart at still another time — and also resist the idea that a person can have a change of mind in anything other than a qualitative sense. In the discussion that follows, this standard view of the matter is called into question. (...) If the argument presented here is sound, it can happen both that one person has numerically different minds at different times and that different people have the same mind at different times. These possibilities, as I take them to be, call for reassessment of some well entrenched assumptions concerning personal identity and responsibility. In particular, they suggest that it may not be true that person A bears responsibility for making decisions person B previously made only on the condition that A is the same person as B. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

In his book Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks has reoriented and fine-tuned an argument from the philosophy of mind to support a selective eliminativism about macroscopic objects.1 The argument turns on a rejection of systematic causal overdetermination and the conviction that microscopic things do the causal work that is attributed to a great many (though not all) macroscopic things. We will argue that Merricks’ argument fails to establish his selective eliminativism.

Addresses many issues including the nature of mind, matter, ideas, and substance; the debate between those who believe human beings have free will and those who subscribe to determinism; fatalism, realism, and personal identity; and ...