PHIL 2025 Lecture 11: January 27.pdf
Document Summary
Last week we encountered both substance and power. Where substance really refers to the bundles of ideas that allow us to identify a particular thing. Power, meanwhile, if active, is the ability to make a something happen. Which leads locke in turn to a discussion of free will (does not exist), freedom and determinism. By resemblance: very different later and earlier things may be identical. Egg, chicken: very similar things may be different. No two things of the same kind can both exist in the same place at the same time (ii. xxvii. 2: so whatever things have the same beginning of existence. So long as a thing continues to exist, its identity with at least one later thing is the case by default (even in the absence of a criterion for picking out the later object) This implies that we don" need to invoke a notion of substance as what affords unity over time and binds the successive.
