Continuants, identity and essentialism

Composition as Identity , Mereological Essentialism , and Counterpart Theory

*Thanks to David Lewis, Michael C. Rea, and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments. 1Lewis, Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 81-87. Other defenders include David Armstrong (Cf. A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 12) and Donald Baxter (Cf. ‘Identity in the Loose and Popular Sense’, Mind 97 (1988), pp. 575-582); E.J. Lowe ...

Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy

The heated feminist debates over 'essentialism' of the 1980s and early 1990s have largely died away, yet they raised fundamental questions for feminist moral and political philosophy which have still to be fully explored. Centrally at issue in feminist controversies over essentialism was whether there are any shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Many leading ...

Maximal continuants and the Fine-Wilf theorem

The following problem was posed by C.A. Nicol: given any finite sequence of positive integers, find the permutation for which the continuant (i.e. the continued fraction denominator) having these entries is maximal, resp. minimal. The extremal arrangements are known for the regular continued fraction expansion. For the singular expansion induced by the backward shift d1/xe − 1/x the problem is ...

SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY Genetics , Identity , and the Anthropology of Essentialism

The Modal and Sortal Properties of Continuants

Eliminativist metaphysicians have recently explored various arguments, including those about over-determination, colocation, the problem of the Many and ontological parsimony, for dispensing with kinds and their token continuants. Further, David Lewis’s missing “real temporary intrinsics” has paved the way to treating the sortal and the modal properties yielding the persistence conditions of co...