Point the following out to him: 1. that we can all use common nouns to refer to many individuals of the same kind, many cats, humans or bear.w And in doing so we recognize that they have something in common with each other (assuming here that nominalism is not a live option for a Whiteheadian). But we could easily include two phases of the same individual. So there must be something common to the same individual at two different moments. The very fat that we can know a multiplicity of members of a the same species entails the identify through time of an individual: our meaningful use of common nouns entails that each individual of a certain kind continues to be the same kind of being, i.e., has an enduring essence.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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