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On Coinciding in Space and Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

J. M. Shorter
Affiliation:
Lincoln College, Oxford

Extract

John Locke claimed that: ‘We never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that, whatever exists anywhere at any time excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone’. He argued that, otherwise, ‘The notions and names of identity and diversity would be in vain, and there could be no such distinctions of substances or anything else one from another’. More recently Professor D. Wiggins has made a similar claim for similar reasons. I shall maintain that, even if we accept the general outline of the essentialist account of identity given by Wiggins in his book, the claim that two things of the same kind cannot be in the same place at the same time should be rejected, until better reasons are forthcoming.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1977

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References

1 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xxvii, 1.Google Scholar

3 ‘On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time’, Philosophical Review (1968), pp. 9095Google Scholar; Identity and Spatio-temporal Continuity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 72.Google Scholar

4 Op. cit.

5 ‘On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time’, p. 94.Google Scholar

6 Op. Cit., p. 93.

7 Op. cit., p. 93.

9 Op. cit., pp. 29–39.

10 Cf. (D.xii), op. cit., p. 39.