Professor Christopher Shields

About the Speaker:
Christopher Shields, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, received his Bachelor of Arts from Bowling Green State University (1979; English Literature) and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University (1986). Professor Shields is a scholar of international reputation in ancient philosophy and has held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, Arizona, Stanford and Corpus Christi College (Oxford). He is the author of several books including Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosohy of Aristotle (Oxford, 1999) and The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (with Robert Pasnau, Westview Press, 2003), and is the editor of the Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2002). Professor Shields has also published articles in most of the top journals in the field, including Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Apeiron, Classical Quarterly, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.

"Diachronic Unity:The Ship of Theseus and Theseus the Man"
Brief Abstract: I assert that there exist non-conventional diachronic unities, and argue that the principles in virtue of which such unities exist must themselves be non-conventional. In exploring the nature of such non-conventional principles, I argue further that the identity conditions of any temporal slices or stages of persons must be parasitic upon temporally enduring entities; it follows, then, that persons cannot be aggregates of temporal slices or stages.

Friday, February 6, 2004 at 5:10 p.m. in Hoyt Hall, Room 215

Funding for this lecture is provided by the Department of Philosophy