In this book, which revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980), David Wiggins examines the logic of identity, the ideas of substance and change, essence, predication and mortal predication, personhood, and personal memory. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.

This volume gathers twelve essays by David Wiggins in an area where his work has been particularly influential. Among the subjects treated are: persistence of a substance through change, the notion of a continuant, the logic of identity, the co-occupation of space by a continuant and its matter, the relation of person to human organism, the metaphysical idea of a person, the status of artefacts, the relation of the three-dimensional and four-dimensional conceptions of reality, and the nomological underpinning of sortal classification. From a much larger body of work the author has selected, edited or annotated, and variously shortened or extended eleven pieces. He has added an Introduction and one completely new essay, on the philosophy of biology and the role there of the idea of process. The collection begins with an essay postdating his Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001), which amends and upstages his earlier presentation of his sortalist conception of identity. In subsequent essays and the introduction Wiggins examines the contributions to these subjects made by Heraclitus, Aristotle, Leibniz, Roderick Chisholm, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Michael Ayers, Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, David Lewis, Fei Xu, and others.

Conditionals has at its centre an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic, which the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods had been preparing for publication at the time of his death in 1993. It appears here edited by his eminent colleague David Wiggins, and accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. This masterly and original treatment of conditionals will demand the attention of all philosophers working in this area.

In this book, which revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980), David Wiggins examines the logic of identity, the ideas of substance and change, essence, predication and mortal predication, personhood, and personal memory. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.

Conditionals has at its centre an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic by the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods. It has been edited by his eminent colleague David Wiggins, and is accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. This masterly and original treatment of conditionals will demand the attention of all philosophers working in this area.

This volume draws together work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis, from 1980 to 2020. Each chapter draws upon previously published material, but that material has been revised, sometimes significantly, for republication here. Opening with a selective account of a century's work in the philosophy of meaning, from Frege and Wittgenstein to the late twentieth century, the book engages first with the nuts and bolts of sentence-construction: predicates and the copula, quantifiers, names, existence treated as a second-level predicate, and adverbial modification. The following five chapters then treat of definition and (as dreamt of by Leibniz and others) the terminus of semantic analysis; the idea of natural languages as real things with a history; the idea of truth conceived as correlative with inquiry (C. S. Peirce) and, finally, the properties we look for in truth itself-the marks, as Frege or Leibniz might have said, of the concept true.

Needs, Values, Truth brings together of some of the most important and influential writings by a leading contemporary philosopher, David Wiggins; they are drawn from twenty-five years of his work in the broad area of the philosophy of value. The author passes to and fro between problems of ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of logic and language; prominent are questions relating to meaning, truth and objectivity in judgements of value. For this third edition he has added a new essay on incommensurability, in addition to making minor revisions to the existing text. The volume will stand as a definitive summation of his work in this area.

Almost every thoughtful person wonders at some time why morality says what it says and how, if at all, it speaks to us. David Wiggins surveys the answers most commonly proposed for such questions--and does so in a way that the thinking reader, increasingly perplexed by the everyday problem of moral philosophy, can follow. His work is thus an introduction to ethics that presupposes nothing more than the reader's willingness to read philosophical proposals closely and literally.

Gathering insights from Hume, Kant, the utilitarians, and a twentieth-century assortment of post-utilitarian thinkers, and drawing on sources as diverse as Aristotle, Simone Weil, and Philippa Foot, Wiggins points to the special role of the sentiments of solidarity and reciprocity that human beings will find within themselves. After examining the part such sentiments play in sustaining our ordinary ideas of agency and responsibility, he searches the political sphere for a neo-Aristotelian account of justice that will cohere with such an account of morality. Finally, Wiggins turns to the standing of morality and the question of the objectivity or reality of ethical demands. As the need arises at various points in the book, he pursues a variety of related issues and engages additional thinkers--Plato, C. S. Peirce, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, John Rawls, Montaigne and others--always emphasizing the words of the philosophers under discussion, and giving readers the resources to arrive at their own viewpoint of why and how ethics matters.