Wiggins on Identity

Abstract

PROFESSOR WIGGINS' book is an impressive and stimulating study of the subject of identity.' It is also an exasperating book to read. The writing is compressed and allusive, often to the point of obscurity. Many of the arguments are extremely sketchy, containing crucial and unobvious inferences for which no justification is given, and some of them are presented in a way that is confusing, if not confused. And the book does not seem to have been designed to be read through in the ordinary manner, from beginning to end; many passages are quite opaque until the reader, following the author's clues in treasure-hunt fashion, has traced a tortuous path through the book's text, its extensive footnotes (where a number of key points are hidden), and its Appendix (a miscellany of sometimes clarifying afterthoughts). But while reading the book is work, it is rewarding work. Wiggins has a subtle and penetrating philosophical mind, is thoroughly familiar with his subject and its literature, and is never glib or superficial. Despite the obscurity of some of his claims and arguments, he generally seemed to me to be on the right track, and some of his discussions are exceptionally insightful and illuminating-for example, his brief but excellent discussion of the relationship between a person and his body. This is a book which no one interested in the notion of identity, or in related notions such as that of an individual substance, can afford to ignore. The book is divided into four parts, but one of these, Part III, is purely transitional. Part I is a criticism of the thesis, which Wiggins calls R, that identity is relative in such a way that a and b can be the same and different g's, where f and g represent different concepts. (I shall follow Wiggins in using f, g, and h to represent sortal predicates and concepts, and in using ordinary predicate variables sC, 5/, and so forth to represent predicates in general. I shall italicize f, g, and h when they are used as dummy names of sortal concepts, but not when they are used as dummy predicates or predicate variables.) Wiggins insists that R is distinct from the thesis, which he calls D, that (as he initially formu-