Abstract
A number of philosophers have thought that necessarily, once a thing has gone out of existence, it is gone for good.1 I am unconvinced. In what follows, I shall consider a number of hypothetical cases in which a thing arguably comes back into existence. I shall not claim that any of the cases provides a decisive refutation of the no-two-beginnings principle; here, as elsewhere in metaphysics, decisive refutations are hard to come by. But I shall claim that they cast serious doubt on the principle, and make it incumbent upon its defender to provide an argument for it. I shall look at one sort of argument, and raise some doubts its cogency. I shall conclude with some remarks about the defensibility of a weakened version of the no-two-beginnings principle.
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Notes
Aquinas attributes the view to Aristotle, and accepts a somwehat weakened version of it himself (see his Commentary on the Sentences,IV, 1, 1, 1). I have often heard the view attributed to Locke, though I have not been able to find a passage where Locke explicitly endorses it. I first began to think about the principle years ago when Anil Gupta suggested to me that it was one of the relatively few Lockean principles that was true.
Fred Feldman has vigorously defended this view in his Confrontations with the Reaper (cf. Feldman [1992]).
See my forthcoming “On the Real (?) Distinction between Persons and Their Bodies”.
Eric Olson expresses sympathy for and attempts to motivate this (Aristotelian) view in Olson [1997], pp.150–52.
Olson says that in the Cartesian demon case, “the interruption of your biological life is brief.” I take it he cannot mean this. For he seems to think that a life cannot outlast the organism living it (p.137), in which case the demon who annihilates me and replaces me with a perfect duplicate a thousandth of a second later terminates my life, rather than interrupting it.
For more on animalism, and Olson’s particular version of animalism, see my [2001].
Cf. Olson [1997], p.133.
Olson’s views appear to imply that if you separate my brainstem from the rest of me (without destroying either), and separate Daniele Giaretta’s brain stem from the rest of him (without destroying either), and then transplant my brainstem into the rest of Daniele, and Daniele’s brainstem into the rest of me, at the end of the process, the animal with almost of all my body and my mind will be not me but Daniele, and the animal with almost all of Daniele’s body and his mind will be not Daniele but me. I find this very hard to believe.
I say, “I am nothing over and above my brainstem” rather than “I become my brainstem”, because, after the separation, one could truly say about me, but not of my brainstem, “that’s something that used to weigh about one hundred and forty five pounds.”
Van Inwagen suggests that the life of a frozen cat might be “squeezed into” various small-scale physical processes. Although he says he finds this suggestion attractive, he allows we might say instead that the frozen cat’s life is suspended rather than disrupted, and that a life that is suspended, unlike a life that is disrupted may resume. If we say this, we will either have to give up either the esse viventibus est vivere principle, or (NTB).
Of course, if you separate just a tiny part of something from most of its parts, the thing usually goes on existing without the bit separated from it (e.g. as a chipped cup); it’s a throughgoing separation of part from part that is prejudicial to a thing’s continued existence.
See, for example, the Apocalypse of Peter 4: 3–4, “He will command the beasts and the birds; He will command that they give back all the flesh they have eaten, because He requires humans to make their appearance.” (see Bauckman [1988], p.272).
See van Inwagen [1990], p.145.
Ibid.,p.147: “We may be confident that the life of an organism which has been blown to bits by a bomb or which has died naturally and has been subject to the normal, ”room-temperature“ processes of biological decay for, say, fifteen minutes has been disrupted. […] If a life has been disrupted, it can never begin again; any life that is going on after its disruption is not that life.”
I briefly discuss the case I am describing in Hughes [1997].
See Lewis [1976].
See Hughes [1997a], p.65.
This might entail being assembled as a single bicycle. But it might only involve not having parts that are “dispersively appropriated.”
It is not crucial that, in the hypothetical situations discussed in the last two sections, we could truly say: “That frog [teacup, temple, bicycle] has come back into existence”. For the purposes of challenging (NTB), it is enough if there is a “sharpened” version of our ordinary concept of frog [teacup, temple, bicycle], or simply a concept akin to our ordinary concept of frog [teacup, temple, bicycle] such that, were we to mobilize that concept, we would truly judge that that frog’ [teacup’, temple’, bicycle’] has come back into existence (where the predicate `frog“ expresses the sharpened version of or alternative to our ordinary frog-concept).
When Dean Zimmerman suggests that persistence requires relations of what he calls immanent causality between earlier and later states of the persisting object, I take it he is endorsing a principle in the neighborhood of the one formulated here. See his remarks on the persistence of a body: “To say that immanent causal connections are required for the persistence of a body is to say that later states of the body must be causally dependent, at least in part, on its earlier states. But not just any sort of causal dependence seems sufficient to give us the kind of immanent causation that is crucial to the persistence of a body. It is not enough [...] that the way my body was at death serve as a blueprint for God’s creating a new one at the general resurrection. That is causal contribution of a sort; but here the causal chain passes through God’s mind; it does not remain ”immanent“ with respect to processes going on within a living human body.” (Zimmerman [1998]). As we shall see, Zimmerman does not argue from the necessity of immanent causality for persistence, to the impossibility of uninterrupted existence.
Shoemaker [1979].
For an attack on the view that identity across time could not be primitive, see Saul Kripke’s unpublished lectures, “Time and Identity.”
Thanks to Andrea Bottani, Pierdaniele Giaretta, Verity Harte, and Mario Mignucci.
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Hughes, C. (2002). Starting Over. In: Bottani, A., Carrara, M., Giaretta, P. (eds) Individuals, Essence and Identity. Topoi Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_23
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