David Wiggins was professor of philosophy at Bedford College, London; professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London; Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University; and a fellow of New College, Oxford. He has published in metaphysics, philosophy of language, moral and political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. His major works are Identity and Spatio-temporal Continuity; Sameness and Substance; Needs, Values, and Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value; and Sameness and Substance Renewed.

The most influential part of Wiggins's work has been in metaphysics, where he has developed a fundamentally Aristotelian conception of substance, enriched by insights drawn from Putnam (1975) and Kripke (1980). His works also contain influential discussions of the problem of personal identity, which Wiggins elucidates via a conception that he calls the "Animal Attribute View."

Wiggins's metaphysic of substance embodies several contentions. The first is that a distinction can be drawn...