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On Dying1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

C. J. F. Williams
C. J. F. Williams
Affiliation:
University of Bristol.
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Extract

The first solid bit of argumentation you get in Plato's Phaedo goes something like this: Whatever comes to be, comes to be from its opposite (cf. 70e, sqq.). If at a certain time t a given thing a begins to be F, before that time t it must have been non-F. Wherever a pair of predicates, F and G, are genuine contradictories; where, that is, they stand to each other in the same relation as F stands in to non-F; it is necessarily true that if a began to be F at t before then a was G. The only trouble comes from the difficulty of finding substitutes for F and G that people will allow to be genuine contradictories. It the butter began to be soft at four o'clock, we may suggest, before four it was hard. A tiresome opponent will retort that there is a state in which butter cannot properly be called either hard or soft. We try again: If Ann began to be asleep at eight, before eight she was awake; if my shirt became dirty on Tuesday, before Tuesday it was clean; if Bonzo died last week, before last week he was alive. And when the advocate of the borderline state reminds us of the various twilight areas of consciousness or cleanliness, we are reduced to legislation: “asleep” shall henceforth apply to every mental state short of complete wakefulness, “alive” to every condition of the body before the onset of putrefaction, “clean” to every shirt incapable of producing a certain measurable discoloration in the water in which it is washed. “Let F and G be contradictories”, we still guardedly maintain: “then if a comes to be F at time t, before time t a was G”.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 44 , Issue 169 , July 1969 , pp. 217 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1969

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References

2 Pace Geach, who on p.267 of Proc. Arist. Soc. 1954–1955Google Scholar says, “‘Poor Fred was alive and is dead’, how could anyone argue that this is not a genuine predication about poor Fred?”

3 In “Form and Existence” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1954–1945Google Scholar, and again in Three Philosophers, pp. 88–100.Google Scholar

4 For an explanation of Geach, 's use of “predicable” cf. his Reference and GeneralityGoogle Scholar, section 18.

5 Philosophical Investigations I, § § 37–45.Google Scholar

6 Three Philosophers, p. 91.Google Scholar

7 A similar doctrine has recently been maintained by ProfessorGale, R. M. in Chapter V of The Language of TimeGoogle Scholar, which largely reproduces an article by him which appeared in The Monist, vol. 50 (1966)Google Scholar. Unfortunately I was not aware of this in time to incorporate mention of it in the text. Gale's thesis differs from mine in that he holds that, e.g., “The G.W.R. was well-run in 1936” presupposes, not “The G.W.R. existed in 1936”, but only “There existed a company named ‘The G.W.R.’”

8 Geach, 's example, “is an ancestor of so-and-so” (Three Philosophers, p. 91)Google Scholar is of this kind.