Sameness and Change

CAN something change and yet remain the same thing? Many philosophers have denied that it can. Change and self-identity, they have held, are incompatible. Some have concluded, on the supposition that self-identity is a necessary condition of a thing, that things do not change-things, that is, in the true and proper sense of the word, real things. Parmenides and Plato are ancient philosophers who drew this conclusion, and it has been drawn in recent times by Whitehead. Other philosophers who have held that change and self-identity are incompatible have adopted the contrary supposition about things: it is change and not sameness which is essential to them. These philosophers have then concluded that things, at least real things, are not self-identical from moment to moment. Heraclitus, apparently, was expressing this conclusion when he made his famous statement about stepping into rivers. And Bergson, more recently, has made a similar point in a variety of ways. Still other philosophers, finally, have held sameness and change to be incompatible without supposing either to be a necessary feature of things in the full or true sense. Thus Hume, for example, argued that the attribution of identity to things whose existence is not invariable and uninterrupted is a mistake, albeit a mistake that all of us constantly make, but he seems not to have held that things of this sort are any less things, or exist in any less significant sense, than those whose existence is invariable and uninterrupted. Against the view that change and sameness are incompatible, however, we have the testimony of Descartes. In the second Meditation Descartes tells of taking a piece of wax fresh from the hive and bringing it near a fire. The wax changed, in some respects radically. Yet, asks Descartes, not the same wax remain (after this change)? It must be granted that it does remain; no one denies it, no one supposes otherwise. Descartes at least thought that things can change and yet remain the same things. He also claimed that everyone thinks this. If we except

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Philosophy, Science, and History

• L'identité est-elle relative

  Open Access•Maryvonne Longeart-Roth•Dialogue•1981

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