Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

In this paper, I endorse the view defended by Hochman and others that there are no races but rather there are only racialized populations. The distinction between “race” being real but socially constructed and being its being non-existent or a ‘myth’ might seem of little importance. But aside from conceptual clarity, the view that there are only racialized populations makes better sense of how racialized populations came into being, how racialization has the profound impacts that it does, and what kind of worlds we might imagine (and work towards) where…

I argue that the account I gave of Derek Parfit’s dividing self-case in “Can the Self Divide?” does not depend on a dubious four-dimensionalist metaphysics as claimed by Eric Olson (2006). I explain my metaphysics of time, and then re-describe my solution in “Can the Self Divide?” comparing it to treatments of the dividing selves by Parfit and Lewis.

Derek Parfit takes the central principle of his discussions of personal identity to be “reductionism”: that our existence and persistence are not basic facts, but consist in something else. A number of striking claims, including the famous unimportance of identity, are supposed to follow from it. But they don’t follow. The main principle in Parfit’s arguments is something far more contentious that is never mentioned: a capacious ontology of material things. But the capacious ontology makes trouble for Parfit: it weakens his claim about the unimportance of identity and undermines…

Eric Olson has made an important addition to the discussion started by Parfit of the argument from the possibility of fission to the unimportance of personal identity. Olson’s discussion is challenging. I want, more briefly, to highlight what is the most important consequence of it. This is that it is metaphysically impossible, impossible in the strongest sense, that any version of Parfit’s argument from fission can yield his conclusion. Olson argues specifically that this is impossible if what he calls a ‘capacious ontology’ is assumed. I argue that it is…