Depth 1 · 34 s
The apple on the desk
Kofi's apple goes from red and crunchy to brown and wrinkled, and is still the same apple. Take away all its properties in your head - is anything left? Two answers to an old question, each with a puzzle.
About this video
Kofi has an apple on his desk. It is red, round, sweet and crunchy, about as heavy as his fist. He leaves it there for a week, and now it is brown, soft and wrinkled. But it is still the same apple - nobody swapped it. So the apple has changed what it is like and stayed the same apple. What, then, is the apple, if not the red, round, sweet thing it was?
Everything you can describe has features - colour, shape, size, weight, taste, smell. A feature like this, something a thing is like, is a property. One property can belong to many things: the apple is red, and so are a fire engine and a strawberry. And one thing can lose a property and gain another and still be the same thing. That second fact leads to the puzzle.
Picture the apple and take away its colour, then its taste and smell, then its shape and size, then its weight. What is left? Philosophers have given two answers. Something is left: the thing that has the properties. Redness doesn't float about on its own; it is the apple's redness, and something has to stay the same while the properties change. John Locke, in 1690, called it "something, he knew not what". Its puzzle: anything you say about this something is another property, so it is something nobody can ever describe, see or touch. Or nothing is left: a thing is its properties bundled together. Looking closely we only ever find properties, and David Hume wrote in 1739 that we have no idea of a thing apart from its properties held together. Its puzzle: if the apple is only its properties, a change of properties should make a different bundle - so how can it stay the same apple?
Neither answer has won; each explains something the other finds hard. This video goes with the Things and Their Properties lesson of Metaphysics Level 1 on Knaph.
This video shows depth 1 of Things and their properties.
Learn Things and their propertiesTranscript
- 0:00Kofi's apple is red, round, sweet and crunchy.
- 0:05A week later it's brown and wrinkled. Still the same apple.
- 0:11Take away its colour, taste, shape and weight. Is anything left?
- 0:17Something under the properties, said Locke. Only a bundle of them, said Hume.
- 0:23Nobody can describe the something. But how does a bundle stay the same?
- 0:29Is a thing more than its properties?