David Wiggins (born 1933) is an English moral philosopher, metaphysician, and philosophical

logician Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

working especially on identity and issues in meta-ethics.

Biography

David Wiggins was born on 8 March 1933 in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, the son of Norman and Diana Wiggins (née Priestley). He attended St Paul's School before reading philosophy at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree. His tutor was J. L. Ackrill. After completing his

National Service National service is the system of voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939. The ...

, he joined the Civil Service and was appointed Assistant Principal in the

Colonial Office The Colonial Office was a government department of the Kingdom of Great Britain and later of the United Kingdom, first created to deal with the colonial affairs of British North America but required also to oversee the increasing number of c ...

, 1957-8. He left the Civil Service and was Jane Eliza Proctor Visiting Fellow at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1958-9. Returning to Oxford, he was Lecturer, 1959, then Fellow and Lecturer, 1960-7, at New College. After that, he was Chair of Philosophy at Bedford College, London, 1967–80; Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at

University College, Oxford University College (in full The College of the Great Hall of the University of Oxford, colloquially referred to as "Univ") is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It has a claim to being the oldest college of the unive ...

, 1981-9; and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, 1989–94; and Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1994-2000. Wiggins was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1978. He was also President of the Aristotelian Society from 1999 to 2000. He was elected a foreign honorary member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 1992.

Philosophical work

Wiggins is well known for his work in

metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

, particularly identity. In his ''Sameness and Substance'' (Oxford, 1980), he proposed

conceptualist realism Philosophical realism is usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters. Realism about a certain kind of thing (like numbers or morality) is the thesis that this kind of thing has ''mind-independent exi ...

, a position according to which our conceptual framework maps reality. According to philosopher Harold Noonan: He has also made an influential contribution to

ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concer ...

. His 2006 book, ''Ethics. Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality'' defends a position he calls "moral objectivism". He has written widely on other areas including

philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epis ...

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

and

political philosophy Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, ...

. A Festschrift, ''Essays for David Wiggins'' was published in 1996.

Legacy

Wiggins' distinguished pupils include:

John McDowell John Henry McDowell, FBA (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ...

, Derek Parfit, Jonathan Westphal,

Timothy Williamson Timothy Williamson (born 1955) is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and fe ...

and

Cheryl Misak Cheryl J. Misak is a Canadian philosopher who works in pragmatism, the history of analytic philosophy, and bioethics. She is a University Professor at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a recipient of a Gugg ...

Selected writings

Books

* ''Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity'' (Oxford, 1967) * ''Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life'' (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1976) * ''Sameness and Substance'' (Harvard, 1980) * ''Needs, Values, Truth'' (1987, 3rd ed., 1998, rev. 2002) * ''Sameness and Substance Renewed'' (Cambridge, 2001) * ''Ethics. Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality'' (Harvard, 2006) * ''Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical'' (2008) * ''Continuants. Their Activity, Their Being, and Their Identity'' (Oxford, 2016)

Articles

* "On Being in the Same Place at the same time", ''Philosophical Review'', vol. 77 (1968), pp. 90–95. * "On Sentence-sense, Word-sense and Difference of Word-sense: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Dictionaries" (1971)In Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovits (edd.) Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 14-34.(link)
* "Towards a reasonable libertarianism" (''Essays on Freedom of Action'', Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) * "Weakness of Will Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire" (''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society'', 1978) * "A Sensible Subjectivism?" (''Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value'', New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, 185–214)

References

External links

Picture of Wiggins
- on the Ryle Room page. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wiggins, David 1933 births 20th-century British non-fiction writers 20th-century English philosophers 20th-century essayists 21st-century British non-fiction writers 21st-century English philosophers 21st-century essayists Analytic philosophers Alumni of Brasenose College, Oxford Aristotelian philosophers British male essayists English logicians English male non-fiction writers Epistemologists Fellows of New College, Oxford Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of University College, Oxford Lecturers Living people Metaphilosophers Metaphysicians Moral philosophers Ontologists Philosophers of art Philosophers of ethics and morality Philosophers of language Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mind Philosophy academics Philosophy writers Political philosophers Presidents of the Aristotelian Society Wykeham Professors of Logic