Defense of Locke's general account of identity against familiar objections

Along with the proliferation of theories about the elements that constitute a substance in post-scholastic early modern philosophy, there is an increasing interest in explaining the persistence of a substance. Different theories of the internal structure of a substance go hand in hand with different accounts of the substance-accident dependence relation and both influence accounts of how it is that a substance endures when its accidents change. Complicating these issues is a tendency among early moderns to hold that there are both simple substances, which include no other substances, and compound ‘substances’, where animals and other living things are compounds. Discussion will center on accounts of these issues urged by Descartes, Arnauld, Locke and Leibniz with attention to connections among them.
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Attendance requires pre-reading of texts provided by Martha Brandt Bolton. The texts will be disseminated by e-mail.