Abstract

What is the materialist response to the classic problem of identity? Is the identity of a pile of bricks the same as that of an organism? Is the identity of an organism the same as that of a person? Faced with this question, the materialist philosopher has several possible responses. She can reduce or dissolve identity into atomic components (as nicely detailed in the article “Epicureismeµ of the Encyclopédie). This may appear to us as a rather thin or unhelpful account of identity. Locke famously challenged such material(ist) accounts. In the following paper I examine Diderot’s response to one version of this problem: not that of personal identity or personhood overall (something I have investigated elsewhere, e.g. Wolfe, 2011b) but rather, to an intermediate state of organization: aggregates. As famously discussed by Leibniz – and Diderot was a reader of Leibniz – aggregates are somehow an intermediate mode of identity, neither atomic multiplicity, nor genuine organismic wholes (or monads). So in what follows I seek to provide one dimension of Diderot’s materialist response to the question of identity, in terms of the nature and status of aggregates