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Identity Through Time Chisholm Analysis

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In “Identity through Time”, Roderick Chisholm speaks on anything but identity to do with concepts of individuation but rather change over time, or diachronic identity. Chisholm begins with the Ship of Theseus which is a philosophical puzzle that has much to do with personal identity. Image that there is a wooden ship and tomorrow you decide to take it apart piece by piece. You take it apart and store it with the intentions of putting it back together at some other time, if you feel like it. Here is the dilemma. When you are removing each piece, it appears to remain the Ship. In fact, intuitively, taking one plank away does not make it a different ship. Once you store that ship you probably will then consider it to be a different ship, or …show more content…

Think of the ‘loose’ and popular concept of identity as common sense. If you were to go to a river, step in, then run around a little then go back to that river and step in you would think, “well, I am no mathematician. But I think I count well enough to know I have stepped in this river twice.” Or if you were to get your car battery replaced with a brand new battery, you do not say that you got a new car. These are examples of the ‘loose’ concept of identity. However, the ‘strict’ and philosophical use of the concept of identity is less forgiving. Think about the ‘strict’ sense as a difficult person. Let’s take the very same Heraclitus quote. If you were to consider the quote from the ‘strict’ concept then when you stepped out of the river, ran around a bit, then went back to the river and stepped your feet in, you wouldn’t be stepping into the same river and you wouldn’t be the same either for probably the same reasons. However, in that same sense if you were to step into the Hudson River then run around and step into the Hudson River again; would it then be considered the same river because there can only be one Hudson River? Ironically, it is much easier to stand by and state the conditions for a ‘strict’ concept because in order for something to remain so it must not be altered in any way, with no changing or moving parts, no matter how identical. It is because of the ease of determining a ‘strict’ concept that there leaves a larger umbrella for ‘loose’ concepts to fall under in popular identity. Honestly, it is due to the garden variety of ways in which identity can be loose that Chisholm singles out five different misuses before moving onto an interpretation of Bishop Butler’s two

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