Ahmed Helmy dives into Davies’ talk on philosophical puzzles and the nature of properties, with a brief detour into the development of metaphysics.
It was an honour to welcome Dr Jonathan Davies to our little salon at the White Hart Inn for a talk on Thursday. The target of Davies’ talk was a redefinition of all natural properties as temporal properties – as you are likely not surprised – several looks of horror, ambivalence, and intense excitement (from really, just me, but excited I truly was) filled the room when it became clear that we were discussing 20th-century analytic metaphysics. But Jonathan acknowledged this, as the target of this talk was essentially to demonstrate just how bad these metaphysical puzzles were. As such, the target of this talk was Peter Geach’s example of Tibbles and Tib, and David Wiggins’ later discussion on it. This puzzle asks what happens to an object’s identity and parts when a piece is removed. Similar to the Ship of Theseus, but with cats, and well, cat-like things, because as we will see, perhaps Tib was never a cat to begin with!
The Death (and Rebirth) of Metaphysics (Or: Why We Started Doing Silly Puzzles.)
Before moving on to the puzzle itself and Davies’ proposed resolution, I will briefly explain the context of 20th-century metaphysics and try to show why it became so strange, as this was a common theme throughout the talk. This revolution in metaphysics, where it became primarily about puzzles, language, and logic, occurred due to the death and subsequent rebirth of metaphysics. In the early 20th century, philosophy began to shift to topics and discussions on the nature of language and the background assumptions of metaphysical inquiry. Before this, metaphysics was a deeply comprehensive subject, where each philosopher constructed an internally elegant system to answer all the fundamental questions of existence; they attempted to answer questions of God, knowledge, and mind, all in one text. But this began to change around the time of the Linguistic Turn.
The Linguistic Turn represented the shift from asking Does God exist? “ to questioning what the terms “Exists or “God ” mean in the first place. While it is hard to pin down the beginning of this, Bertrand Russel’s 1905 article On Denoting represents a clear shift, where Russel effectively introduced logical and linguistic analysis as a means to solving metaphysical problems. He introduces a clearly false statement: “The Present King of France is Bald”; this is obviously false, but Russel argues that it does not refer to an object (the King); rather, it presents an existence claim that can be evaluated and fails. That claim is “There exists an X, such that X is the King of France, and X is bald”. The existence claim fails; it is false. This introduced the idea that our language has introduced many metaphysical problems that simply do not matter and are confusions of language.
This was hammered home in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, largely credited with the death of metaphysics. Wittgenstein’s intervention is often seen as the full death of the subject, with his conclusion that any metaphysical statement attempting to speak outside logic is just a confusion of grammar and nonsensical. This culminated in Logical Positivism – beginning in English with AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. A sharp, polemic assertion that any statement that cannot be scientifically verified or proven true in any way is totally meaningless, including all metaphysical enquiries.
At this point, it seemed metaphysics was done, its place in academia superseded by empiricism; the need for armchair theories was effectively dead. So why are we discussing puzzles about cats in 2026? Philosopher Quine, in his 1948 paper On What There Is, revived the field by showing we have an ontological commitment to define the entities (such as numbers, sets, physical objects) that the empirical sciences compel us to accept as real, bringing us to the puzzle of Tibbles and Tib, as we try to denote what an ontological being, like a cat, actually is. Most of the puzzles Jonathan discusses are of this nature, tearing objects up into theoretical ontological divisions, to try to discover the latent truth behind them, leading to many wacky – and according to Davies – often bad puzzles.
Tibbles, Not Tib and Jonathon Davies’ resolution
Imagine a cat – Tibbles; he is sitting on the mat, minding his own business. Then at time T1, Tibbles suddenly loses his tail. But before T2, when Tibbles sat without a tail, someone made out a strange entity: Tibbles minus Tibbles’ tail, denoted as Tib. Both Tib and Tibbles were sitting on the mat at T1, so is the cat on T3 Tib, or is it Tibbles? Does this show the transitivity of identity? They cannot be the same two cats, as two entities cannot be in the same place at the same time; so which is it? Davies took a detour here to clarify again – this puzzle does suck. He tries to defeat it by arguing that all properties that exist in the natural world must be temporally extended. In other words, a cat cannot exist at a static point in time; it necessarily extends and flows through time.
This misunderstanding comes from the fact that these philosophers seem not to really understand cats – Davies made the point that it is not a common feature for cats to eternally eject matter and reabsorb it into themselves, as Tib allegedly does. Tib is consequently not a cat; his nervous system does not function as a real cat does in the actual world. Cats cannot exist at static points in time; they are not parts of time but necessarily exist in its process.
Davies then made some clarifying remarks: by defining all natural properties as temporal properties, properties are what we can describe a thing as. So I have curly hair; the object X, denoted as Ahmed, has the property of curly hair. Tibbles has the property of being a cat, and cats do not behave in the manner discussed; they are alive only insofar as all their cellular functions continue, they breathe, they purr, they meow, they move, they are effectively dependent on time – so a cat that exists outside of the process of time simply is not a cat.
In other words, a cat’s properties depend on being temporal. Davies ran through several examples, such as mountains needing to be fundamentally dynamic; they do not just stand still but are also continually dynamic. The same applies to being ginger, and to a discussion of the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics, where everything is constantly dynamic. This all falls under Process Philosophy, which views reality as a web of dynamic, interconnected events rather than static material objects.
This all culminated in Davies’ succinct definition and resolution to the problem: “If being x is a property, then all instances of being an x are temporal → all things are temporal and cannot be static.”
After the conclusion of the talk, we had a riveting conversation, having been joined by two physics students who took the role of the realists in the midst of several abstract, imagine-if objections, an extended discussion on the definition of space-time – and even a detour on the Bee movie (and debunking the myth that bees can’t fly as completely bogus in the process).
Thank you to Jonathan for this incredible talk; it was a phenomenal experience, and everyone else and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Works discussed and references:
Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, truth and logic. London: Victor Gollancz.
Geach, P.T. (1962) Reference and generality: An examination of some medieval and modern theories. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Quine, W.V.O. (1948) ‘On what there is’, The Review of Metaphysics, 2(1), pp. 21–38.
Russell, B. (1905) ‘On denoting’, Mind, 14(56), pp. 479–493.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wiggins, D. (1968) ‘On being in the same place at the same time’, The Philosophical Review, 77, pp. 90–95.
Further Reading Recommendations for anyone interested in Metaphysics and the development towards Possible Worlds:
Baxter, D. (1988) ‘Identity in the loose and popular sense’, Mind, 97(388), pp. 575–582.
Lewis, D. (1986) On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Sider, T. (2001) Four-dimensionalism: an ontology of persistence and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomson, J.J. (1983) ‘Parthood and identity across time’, The Journal of Philosophy, 80(4), pp. 201–220.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and reality: an essay in cosmology. New York: Macmillan.