Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Update

Things have been pretty crazy around here: semester is starting, teaching is being prepared and the long summer days seem a long time ago.

I'm currently working on the ideas about primitive vagueness I talked about in a post below. I'm giving a "work in progress" seminar here in Leeds on these next week, and hopefully then I'll give a fuller paper on some of this stuff at York and Durham later in the year. I'm pretty excited about this stuff, not least because it gives me a chance to think about modalism, temporalism and other funky things.

Currently, I'm trying to work out what Evans' argument looks like to the primitivist. After that, next on the agenda is vague existence (after all, why can't it just *be the case* that it is vague whether Tibbles exists, for the primitivist?) Sider has some interesting way of making precise a worry about this, and I think the primitivist is able to buy into enough of his premises to make the debate interesting.

In the end though, primitivism doesn't need vague existence or identity to be coherent in order to be good: not unless we have arguments that take us from metaphysical vagueness in general to those particular kinds of metaphysical vagueness. And that's my other project at the moment: to try and survey those kind of connections for the Ontic Vagueness paper.

On that note, I just found some really interesting discussion of vague survival (in the context of personal fission cases) in a classic Bernard Williams paper "The self and the future". I'll be trying to get my head around this stuff soon.

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