Sydney Shoemaker (Cornell University): "Persistence and Properties"

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Zrinyi u. 14
Room: 
412
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm

Sydney Shoemaker (born 1931) is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. He has worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and has many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), he argues that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argues that the phenomenon of absolute 'Immunity to Error Through Misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds"). In metaphysics, he has defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional causal powers. He has also applied his view of properties to the problem of mental causation. He also has distinguished contributions to the literature on self-knowledge and personal identity, where he defended a Lockean psychological continuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts". In his recent work on the content of perception, he has argued for a distinctive version of internalist representationalism.

Publications

  • Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963).
  • Personal Identity (coauthored with Richard Swinburne) (1984).
  • Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays (1984).
  • The First-Person Perspective, and other Essays (1996).
  • Physical Realization (2007).

ABSTRACT OF “PERSISTENCE AND PROPERTIES”

            The paper defends three-dimensionalism about ordinary objects, and rejects both the four-dimensionalist view that such objects are “space-time worms” and the “stage theory” that they are momentary thing-stages.  It allows that there are entities of which four-dimensionalism is true, entities having temporal parts, and that there is a sense in which the existence of ordinary objects is grounded in the existence of such entities.  But ordinary objects cannot themselves be such entities.  This is because of the kinds of properties they have.  On the one hand these are “temporally local,” in the sense that their instantiation at a time does not constitutively depend on what is true at other times.  But they are individuated by causal profiles that point towards the future careers of the things that have them, requiring that such successor states as their instantiations have be related to them in certain ways, these being ways that constitute the persistence of the objects over time.  Space-time worms and momentary stages cannot have properties of this sort