In this essay I take issue with Derek Parfit's reductionist account of personal identity.Parfit is concerned to respond to what he sees as flaws in the conception of the role of 'person' in self-interest theories. He attempts to show that the notion of a person as something over and above a totality of mental and physical states and events (in his words, a 'further fact'), is empty, and so, our ethical concerns must be based on something other than this. My (...) objections centre around the claim that Parfit employs an impoverished conception of 'life'. Parfit misconceives the connection between 'I' and one's body, and, so, despite his rejection of a metaphysical conception of 'self', remains within the logic of Cartesianism. What Parfit and other reductionists call an 'impersonal' perspective, I shall call the third-person perspective: a perspective which one in general may take. Against Parfit I shall offer a more complex conception of 'self' through the concept of 'bodily perspective'. I emphasize the irreducible ambiguities of human embodiment in order to show the presuppositions and the limitations of Parfit's view. Of interest is the conception of time and the model of continuity that is appropriate to an embodied subject's life. I employ Paul Ricoeur's concept of 'human time' to argue that the reflective character of human experience demands a model of temporality and continuity that differs significantly from the one Parfit employs. (shrink)

Derek Parfit's “reductionist” account of personal identity (including the rejection of anything like a soul) is coupled with the rejection of a commonsensical intuition of essential self-unity, as in his defense of the counter-intuitive claim that “identity does not matter.” His argument for this claim is based on reflection on the possibility of personal fission. To the contrary, Simon Blackburn claims that the “unity reaction” to fission has an absolute grip on practical reasoning. Now David Lewis denied Parfit's claim that (...) reductionism contravenes common sense, so I revisit the debate between Parfit and Lewis, showing why Parfit wins it. Is reductionism about persons then inherently at odds with the unity reaction? Not necessarily; David Velleman presents a reductionist theory according to which fission does not conflict with the unity reaction. Nonetheless, relying on the distinction between person level descriptions of first-person states and the first-person perspective itself, I argue that Velleman's theory does not eliminate fission-based conflict with the unity reaction. Footnotesa * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the philosophy departments at Rutgers University and Bowling Green State University. I am indebted to many members of these audiences, and to the other contributors to this volume, for their comments—especially Frank Arntzenius, Michael Bradie, David Copp, John Finnis, Jerry Fodor, Brian Loar, Barry Loewer, Colin McGinn, Fred Miller, Mark Moyer, David Oderberg, Marya Schechtman, David Schmidtz, David Sobel, and Sara Worley. Special thanks to David Sanford. I am also grateful to graduate students in my seminar at Bowling Green during the spring of 2003, for urging me to take seriously the grip of the unity reaction; I am especially grateful for the comments of Nico Maloberti, Jonathan Miller, John Milliken, Robyn Peabody, Jennifer Sproul, Jessica Teaman, and Sherisse Webb. (shrink)

The so-called “problem of personal identity” can be viewed as either a metaphysical or an epistemological issue. Metaphysicians want to know what it is for one individual to be the same person as another. Epistemologists want to know how to decide if an individual is the same person as someone else. These two problems converge around evidence from mediumship and apparent reincarnation cases, suggesting personal survival of bodily death and dissolution. These cases make us wonder how it might be possible (...) for a person to survive death and either temporarily or permanently animate another body. And they make us wonder how we could decide if such postmortem survival has actually occurred. In this essay I argue, first, that metaphysical worries about postmortem survival are less important than many have supposed. Next, I'll consider briefly why cases suggesting postmortem survival can be so intriguing and compelling, and I'll survey our principal explanatory options and challenges. Then, I'll consider why we need to be circumspect in our appraisal of evidence for mind-body correlations. And finally, I'll try to draw a few tentative and provocative conclusions. (shrink)

This paper considers the question whether a psychological approach to personal identity can be formulated within an endurantist, as opposed to four-dimensionalist, framework. Trenton Merricks has argued that this cannot be done. I argue to the contrary: a perfectly coherent endurantist version of the psychological approach can indeed be formulated.

Lynne Rudder Baker’s Constitution View of human persons has come under much recent scrutiny. Baker argues that each human person is constituted by, but not identical to, a human animal. Much of the critical discussion of Baker’s Constitution View has focused upon this aspect of her account. Less has been said about the positive diachronic account of personal identity offered by Baker. Baker argues that it is sameness of what she labels ‘first-person perspective’ that is essential to understanding personal identity (...) over time . Baker claims that her account avoids the commitment to indeterminacy of personal identity entailed by the psychological account. Further, the psychological account, but not her account, is plagued by what Baker labels the ‘duplication problem’. In the end, I argue that neither of these considerations forces us to renounce the psychological account and adopt Baker’s favored account. (shrink)

Considerations of personal identity bear on John Searle's Chinese Room argument, and on the opposed position that a computer itself could really understand a natural language. In this paper I develop the notion of a virtual person, modelled on the concept of virtual machines familiar in computer science. I show how Searle's argument, and J. Maloney's attempt to defend it, fail. I conclude that Searle is correct in holding that no digital machine could understand language, but wrong in holding that (...) artificial minds are impossible: minds and persons are not the same as the machines, biological or electronic, that realize them. (shrink)

Theories of personal identity purport to specify truth conditions for sentences of the form 'x-at-ti is the same person as y-at-tj. Most philosophers nowadays agree that such truth conditions are to be stated in terms of psychological continuity. However; opinions vary as to how the notion of psychological continuity is to be understood. In a recent contribution to this journal, Slors offers an account in which psychological continuity is spelled out in terms of narrative connectedness between mental states.The present paper (...) argues that Slors' theory either is no theory of personal identity at all or is too weak.Towards the end of the paper, it is indicated how the problem uncovered for Slors' theory may be avoided. (shrink)

We are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; we feel its existence and its continuing to exist, and are certain - more even than any demonstration could make us - both of its perfect identity and of its simplicity. The strongest sensations and most violent emotions, instead of distracting us from this view ·of our self·, only focus it all the more intensely, making us think about how these sensations and emotions affect our self by bringing (...) it pain or pleasure. To offer further evidence of the existence of one’s self would make it less evident, not more, because no fact we could use as evidence is as intimately present to our consciousness as is the existence of our self. If we doubt the latter, we can’t be certain of anything. (shrink)

Defenders of the thesis of self-ownership generally focus on the “ownership” part of the thesis and say little about the metaphysics of the self that is said to be self-owned. But not all accounts of the self are consistent with robust self-ownership. Philosophical accounts of the self are typically enshrined in theories of personal identity, and the paper examines various such theories with a view to determining their suitability for grounding a metaphysics of the self consistent with self-ownership. As it (...) happens, only one such theory is suitable: the hylemorphic theory of Aristotle and Aquinas. To adopt such a theory, however, is to see that self-ownership may in some respects have implications different from those many of its defenders take it to have. Footnotesa For comments on earlier versions of this essay, I thank Christopher Kaczor, Ellen Frankel Paul, the participants at an Institute for Humane Studies current research workshop in January 2004, and the other contributors to this volume. (shrink)

The four kinds of explanation identified by Aquinas at the beginning of his commentary on Aristotle's Ethics are deployed to show that the identity of the human person is sui generis and mysterious, even though each of its elements is more or less readily accessible to our understanding. The essay attends particularly to the explorations by Aquinas and, with different techniques, by Shakespeare of the experience and understanding of (a) one's lasting presence to oneself as one and the same bodily (...) and mental self, and (b) one's self-shaping by one's free choices, especially of commitments. Shakespeare further explores these, quite deliberately, through displays of mistaken identity and humiliating deflations of the personas one constructs for life in society. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt characterizes love as “a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it.” As such, he views romantic love as an inauthentic paradigm for love since such love desires reciprocation, sexual gratification and so on. I argue that Frankfurt’s conception of love is (a) too general—he does not distinguish between the type of love one has for one’s partner, one’s country, a moral ideal, etc., (b) it overemphasizes the role of bestowal (...) at the expense of the part played by appraisal and (c) it is insufficiently social. Certain forms of love, romantic love and friendship for instance, are defined largely in terms of reciprocation. For Frankfurt, reciprocation is somewhat of an accidental feature of love. This deficiency in Frankfurt’s conception of love can be traced to a problem in his conception of selfhood which I argue is insufficiently social in nature. (shrink)

As a critic, I am in the unenviable position of agreeing with nearly all of what Mark does in this lucid, erudite and creative book. My comments will hence not be aimed at showing what he got wrong, as much as an attempt from a Madhyamaka point of view to suggest another way of seeing things, in particular another way of seeing how one might think of how Madhyamaka philosophers, such as Någårjuna and Candrak¥rti, see conventional truth, our engagement with (...) conventional truth, and the status of persons. I suspect that this alternative is also in the minds of earlier Buddhist philosophers, and that Madhyamaka may be more an explicit working out of ideas implicit in the tradition than a radical break. If this suspicion—for which I will not argue here—is correct, this alternative is also available to those to whom Mark refers as “reductionists.” I think that this way of seeing things may put certain ideas in Buddhist philosophy into better focus, and may indeed make them more attractive as well. (shrink)

The first book synthesizing the many different topics that surround the issue of personal identity, this text makes an important contribution to the philosophy of personal identity and mind, and to epistemology.

Hylomorphism offers a third way between animalist approaches to personal identity that maintain psychology is irrelevant to our persistence and neo-Lockean accounts that deny we are animals. A Thomistic-inspired account is provided that explains the intuitive responses to thought experiments involving brain transplants and the transformation of organic bodies into inorganic ones without having to follow the animalist in abandoning the claim that it is our identity that matters in survival nor countenance the puzzles of spatially coincident entities that plague (...) the neo-Lockean. The key is to understand the human being as only contingently an animal. This approach to our animality is one that Catholics have additional reason to hold given certain views about Purgatory, our uniqueness as free and rational creatures, and our having once existed as zygotes. (shrink)

If Purgatory involves just an immaterial soul undergoing a transformation between our death and resurrection, then, as Aquinas recognized, it won't be us in Purgatory. Drawing upon Parfit's ideas about identity not being what matters to us, we explore whether the soul's experience of Purgatory could still be beneficial to it as well as the deceased human who didn't experience the purging yet would possess the purged soul upon resurrection. We also investigate an alternative non-Thomistic hylomorphic account of Purgatory in (...) which humans would survive during the period between death and resurrection in a bodiless form with a soul as their only proper part. (shrink)

Brain transplants and the dicephalus (an organism just like us except that it has two cerebrums) are thought to support the position that we are essentially thinking creatures, not living organisms. I try to offset the first of these intuitions by responding to thought experiments Peter Unger devised to show that identity is what matters. I then try to motivate an interpretation of the alleged conjoined twins as really just one person cut off from himself by relying upon what I (...) take will be the reader's disagreement with Locke's conjecture that a dreaming Socrates and an awake Socrates are two distinct people. (shrink)

In the first part of this article, I argue that even those entities that in their own right and for their own sake give us reason not to destroy them and to help them are sometimes substitutable for the good of other entities. In so arguing, I consider the idea of being valuable as an end in virtue of intrinsic and extrinsic properties. I also conclude that entities that have claims to things and against others are especially nonsubstitutable. In the (...) second part, I argue that cloning poses no threat to the nonsubstitutability of these entities (and in this sense, to the dignity of persons). I also consider the relation between cloning and (what I called) holistic identity, and between the latter and genetic identity. In the concluding part of the article, I try to distinguish cases where identity over time and so-called person-affecting acts have and do not have greater moral significance than nonidentity over time and nonperson-affecting acts. I try to apply my results to cases involving embryos, future generations, and to the so-called Non-Identity Problem. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker leads today’s “neo-Lockean” liberation of persons from the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson, according to whom persons are biological entities and who challenge all neo-Lockean views on grounds that abstracting from strictly physical, or bodily, criteria plays fast and loose with our identities. There is a fundamental mistake on both sides: a false dichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychological continuity theories of personal identity. Neo-Lockeans, like everyone else today who relies on Locke’s analysis of (...) personal identity, including Derek Parfit, have either completely distorted or not understood Locke’s actual view. Shoemaker’s defense, which uses a “package deal” definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity and employs the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity, leaves far less room for psychological continuity views than for my own view, which, independently of its radical implications, is that (a) consciousness makes personal identity, and (b) in consciousness alone personal identity consists—which happens to be also Locke’s actual view. Moreover, the ubiquitous Fregean conception of borders and the so-called “ambiguity of is” collapse in the light of what Hintikka has called the “Frege trichotomy.” The Ramsey–Lewis account, due to the problematic way Shoemaker tries to bind the variables, makes it impossible for the neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfill the uniqueness clause required by all such Lewis style definitions; such attempts avoid circularity only at the expense of mistaking isomorphism with identity. Contrary to what virtually all philosophers writing on the topic assume, fission does not destroy personal identity. A proper analysis of public versus perspectival identification, derived using actual case studies from neuropsychiatry, provides the scientific, mathematical and logical frameworks for a new theory of self-reference, wherein “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” and the “I,” can be precisely defined in terms of the subject and the subject-in-itself. (shrink)

: In this paper, I consider objections to advance directives based on the claim that there is a discontinuity of interests, and of personal identity, between the time a person executes an advance directive and the time when the patient has become severely demented. Focusing narrowly on refusals of life-sustaining treatment for severely demented patients, I argue that acceptance of the psychological view of personal identity does not entail that treatment refusals should be overridden. Although severely demented patients are morally (...) considerable beings, and must be kept comfortable whilst alive, they no longer have an interest in receiving life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

We discuss first a "stance" methodology toward the problem of personhood. This is to ask first, what it is to take something to be a person, and then to move via a notion of appropriateness to an answer to what it is to be a person. We argue that the distinctions between persons and non-persons, between agents and patients, and between subjects and mere objects are deeply connected. All three distinctions are themselves traced to a fundamental distinction within the space (...) of reasons -- between, that is, two sorts of material inferential propriety. These two structures of inference are made explicit by indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Tracing personhood to the fundamentally stereoscopic structure of material inference sheds light not only on notions of freedom, agency, and personhood, but on the nature of modal judgments, on the conceptual space of causation, and on the semantics of the explicitating conditionals. We conclude with a pragmatic argument for belief in persons. (shrink)

Recent developments in the field of neurosurgery, specifically those dealing with the modification of mood and affect as part of psychiatric disease, have led some researchers to discuss the ethical implications of surgery to alter personality and personal identity. As knowledge and technology advance, discussions of surgery to alter undesirable traits, or possibly the enhancement of normal traits, will play an increasingly larger role in the ethical literature. So far, identity and enhancement have yet to be explored in a neurosurgical (...) context, despite the fact that 1) neurological disease and treatment both potentially alter identity, and 2) that neurosurgeons will likely be the purveyors of future enhancement implantable technology. Here, we use interviews with neurosurgical patients to shed light on the ethical issues and challenges that surround identity and enhancement in neurosurgery. The results provide insight into how patients approach their identity prior to potentially identity-altering procedures and what future ethical challenges lay ahead for clinicians and researchers in the field of neurotherapeutics. (shrink)

Many bioethicists working in reproductive ethics tacitly assume some theory of diachronic personal identity. For example, Peter Singer argues that there is no identity relation between a foetus and a future individual because the former shares no robust mental connections with the latter. Consequently, abortion prevents the existence of an individual; it does not destroy an already existing individual. Singer's argument implicitly appeals to the psychological account of personal identity, which, although endorsed by many philosophers such as Derek Parfit, is (...) contentious. Singer does not attempt to defend the psychological account before applying it to the moral permissibility of abortion. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, very few bioethicists attempt antecedently to defend their chosen theory of personal identity before applying it to their ethical arguments. In this paper, I look at the issues of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and human reproductive cloning in order to illustrate how many of the arguments made by bioethicists on these topics are, at least partly, based upon veiled metaphysical assumptions. My objective is to illustrate that progress can be made on these topics by attending to their fundamental metaphysical claims. (shrink)

I take Eric Olson’s account of personal identity to have two components. First there is his characterization of the problem of personal identity. Here’s a paraphrase of some things Olson says on p. 23 of The Human Animal.1..

This paper has two main aims. The first is to propose a new way of characterizing the problem of personal identity. The second is to show that the metaphysical picture that underlies my proposal has important implications for the 3D/4D debate. I start by spelling out several of the old ways of characterizing the problem of personal identity and saying what I think is wrong with each of them. Next I present and motivate some metaphysical principles concerning property instantiations that (...) underlie my proposal. Then I introduce the new way of characterizing the problem of personal identity that I am recommending, and I show that it avoids the difficulties facing the old ways. I also mention several vexing problems that arise in connection with certain popular views about personal identity, and I argue that if we formulate the problem of personal identity in the way that I am proposing, then each of these problems can be handled fairly easily. Finally, I show that there is an additional benefit to adopting my proposal, namely, that several other important problems facing anyone who endorses a 3D view of persistence (as opposed to the 4D, “temporal parts” view of persistence) can all be resolved in a relatively straightforward.. (shrink)

1. In the Essay, Locke’s most controversial claim, which he slipped into Book IV almost as an aside, was that matter might think (Locke1975:IV.iii.6;540-1).i Either because he was genuinely pious, which he was, or because he was clever, which he also was, he tied the denial that matter might think to the claim that God’s powers are limited, thus, attempting to disarm his critics. It did not work. Stillingfleet and others were outraged. If matter can think, then for explanatory purposes (...) the immaterial soul might be dispensable. But throughout the eighteenth century explanatory purposes were at the top of the agenda. And what had always made the soul so handy for proving immortality - that it is non-composite, static, and inaccessible to empirical examination - is also what made it so useless for investigating human nature. By contrast, consciousness is multifaceted, dynamic, and open to empirical investigation. Early in the century a Clarke might take the high road and resist descent into the merely probable and contingent. But when it came to investigating persons, the emerging science of human nature was the only game in town. One either played it or took oneself out of the action. (shrink)

Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concept of soul in western thought, from Plato to the present. The authors place particular emphasis on the eighteenth century which witnessed an enormous intellectual transformation in the way theorists perceived self and personal identity and paved the way for contemporary philosophical and psychological debates.

These are the very scholars that were involved in initiating the revolution in personal identity theory.

: A fascinating criticism of abortion occasioned by prenatal diagnosis of potentially disabling traits is that the complex of test-and-abortion sends a morally disparaging message to people living with disabilities. I have argued that available versions of this "expressivist" argument are inadequate on two grounds. The most fundamental is that, considered as a practice, abortions prompted by prenatal testing are not semantically well-behaved enough to send any particular message; they do not function as signs in a rule-governed symbol system. Further, (...) even granting, for the sake of argument, the expressive power of testing and aborting, it would not be possible, contra the argument's proponents, to distinguish between abortions undertaken because of beliefs about the disabling conditions the fetus might face as a child and abortions undertaken for many other possible reasons--e.g., because of the poverty the fetus would face or the increase in family size that the birth of a new child would occasion. Here, I respond to criticisms of those arguments, and propose and defend another: the expressivist argument cannot, in general, distinguish successfully between abortion and therapy as modalities for responding to disabilities. (shrink)

According to one argument for Animalism about personal identity, animal , but not person , is a Wigginsian substance concept—a concept that tells us what we are essentially. Person supposedly fails to be a substance concept because it is a functional concept that answers the question “what do we do?” without telling us what we are. Since person is not a substance concept, it cannot provide the criteria for our coming into or going out of existence; animal , on the (...) other hand, can provide such criteria. This argument has been defended by Eric Olson, among others. I argue that this line of reasoning fails to show Animalism to be superior to the Psychological Approach, for the following two reasons: (1) human animal , animal , and organism are all functional concepts, and (2) the distinction between what something is and what it does is illegitimate on the reading that the argument needs. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

It has always concentrated upon man, and usually the comparative approach has not been used to study the evolution of behaviour, but in the hope that ...

One of the main problems of personal identity is supposed to be how we relate to our bodies. A few philosophers endorse what is called a 'bodily criterion of personal identity': they say that we are our bodies, or at any rate that our identity over time consists in the identity of our bodies. Many more deny this--typically on the grounds that we can imagine ourselves coming apart from our bodies. But both sides agree that the bodily criterion is an (...) important view which anyone thinking about personal identity must consider. (shrink)

What is a person? What makes me the same person today that I was yesterday or will be tomorrow? Philosophers have long pondered these questions. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates observed that all of us are constantly undergoing change: we experience physical changes to our bodies, as well as changes in our 'manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, [and] fears'. Aristotle theorized that there must be some underlying 'substratum' that remains the same even as we undergo these changes. John Locke rejected (...) Aristotle's view and reformulated the problem of personal identity in his own way: is a person a physical organism that persists through time, or is a person identified by the persistence of psychological states, by memory? These essays - written by prominent philosophers and legal and economic theorists - offer valuable insights into the nature of personal identity and its implications for morality and public policy. (shrink)

One of the central theses of egalitarian liberals in the domain of distributive justice is that talented individuals should not be allowed to keep their entire market-income even if it flows solely from their greater abilities. This claim is usually supported by one of several arguments or some mixture of them, but in the present paper, I want to concentrate on the version that invokes equality of opportunity as its starting point. Namely, it is claimed that every human being should (...) enjoy an equal starting point in the life-race but that this is not secured insofar as some have greater natural talents than others. Therefore, egalitarians hold that results that arise from such an unfair situation are unjust and should be corrected by a redistributive taxation. I want to criticize this argument by hoping to show that it presupposes an untenable view about identity of persons. (shrink)

Marya Schechtman’s narrative self-constitution view relies on an account of reality as self-evident that eclipses the interpretive labor required to fix the content of intelligibility. As a result, her view illegitimately limits what counts as identity-conferring narrative and problematically excludes many with psychiatric disabilities from the category of full personhood. Plantikow cautions personal identity theorists against this move and offers an alternative approach to engaging in and conceptualizing narrative construction.

: Debates on precedent autonomy and some forms of paternalistic interventions, which are related to questions of personal identity, are analyzed. The discussion is based on the distinction between personal identity as persistence and as biographical identity. It first is shown that categorical objections to advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are based on false assumptions about personal identity that conflate persistence and biographical identity. Therefore, advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are ethically acceptable tools for prolonging one's autonomy. The notions of (...) personality and biographical identity are used to analyze the ethically relevant features. Thereby, it is shown that these concepts are operative in and useful for thinking in biomedical ethics. The overall conclusion is that categorical arguments against precedent autonomy or "Ulysses contracts" are based on misleading theories of personal identity and that advance directives are an ethically respectable tool for prolonging individuals' autonomy in cases of dementia and mental illness. (shrink)

This is a draft of the written version of comments on a paper by David Cole, presented orally at the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in New Orleans, 27 April 1990. Following the written comments are 2 appendices: One contains a letter to Cole updating these comments. The other is the handout from the oral presentation.

What marks the traditional privacy torts of disclosure, intrusion, false light, and appropriation is that they require an invasion, an intrinsic harm caused by someone doing something to us without our consent. But we are now voluntarily giving up information about ourselves--to our physicians, for instance--that is being gathered into databases that are brought and sold and that can be appropriated by those who wish to assume our identities. The way in which our privacy is put at risk is different, (...) and this leads to a new understanding of the concept of privacy. Others appropriate our identities, treating us as objects; by doing so, our standing as autonomous moral agents, controlling how we present ourselves to the world, is thus denied. (shrink)

Self-interest is widely regarded as an important, if not as the only, source of reasons for action, and hence it is widely held that one can rationally give special weight to one’s self-interest in deciding how to act. In what follows, I will argue against this view. I will do so by following the lead of Derek Parfit, and considering cases in which personal identity appears to break down. My argument will differ from Parfit’s, however, in that it will have (...) a stronger conclusion, it will involve fewer assumptions, and it will be compatible with a wider range of theories of personal identity. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of personal identity depend upon thought experiments which describe psychological vicissitudes and question whether the original person survives in the person resulting from the described change. These cases are meant to determine the types of psychological change compatible with personal continuation. Two main accounts of identity try to capture this distinction; psychological continuity theories and narrative theories. I argue that neither fully succeeds since both overlook the importance of a relationship I call “empathic access.” I define empathic access (...) and discuss its role in a complete account of personal identity. (shrink)

It has long been thought that certain key bioethical views depend heavily on work in personal identity theory, regarding questions of either our essence or the conditions of our numerical identity across time. In this paper I argue to the contrary, that personal identity is actually not significant at all in this arena. Specifically, I explore three topics where considerations of identity are thought to be essential – abortion, definition of death, and advance directives – and I show in each (...) case that the significant work is being done by a relation other than identity. (shrink)

Many philosophers have taken there to be an important relation between personal identity and several of our practical concerns (among them moral responsibility, compensation, and self-concern). I articulate four natural methodological assumptions made by those wanting to construct a theory of the relation between identity and practical concerns, and I point out powerful objections to each assumption, objections constituting serious methodological obstacles to the overall project. I then attempt to offer replies to each general objection in a way that leaves (...) the project intact, albeit significantly changed. Perhaps the most important change stems from the recognition that the practical concerns motivating investigation into personal identity turn out to be not univocal, as is typically thought, such that each of the different practical concerns may actually be related to personal identity in very different ways. (shrink)

This book initiates a conversation between the two traditions showing how concepts and tools drawn from one philosophical tradition can help solve problems ...

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given (...) the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson). (shrink)

An analysis of the identity issues involved in facial allograft transplantation is provided in this paper. The identity issues involved in organ transplantation in general, under both theoretical accounts of personal identity and subjective accounts provided by organ recipients, are examined. It is argued that the identity issues involved in facial allograft transplantation are similar to those involved in organ transplantation in general, but much stronger because the face is so closely linked with personal identity. Recipients of facial allograft transplantation (...) have the potential to feel that their identity is a mix between their own and the donor’s, and the donor’s family is potentially likely to feel that their loved one ‘‘lives on’’. It is also argued that facial allograft transplantation allows the recipients to regain an identity, because they can now be seen in the social world. Moreover, they may regain expressivity, allowing for them to be seen even more by others, and to regain an identity to an even greater extent. Informing both recipients and donors about the role that identity plays in facial allograft transplantation could enhance the consent process for facial allograft transplantation and donation. (shrink)

Abstract: There is no such thing as 'the' hylemorphic account of personal identity. There are several views that count as hylemorphic, and these views can be grouped into two main families—the corruptionist view, and the survivalist view. The differentiating factor is that the corruptionist view holds that the persistence of the soul is not sufficient for the persistence of the person, while the survivalist view holds that the persistence of the soul is sufficient for the persistence of the person. In (...) this paper, I argue that hylemorphists should prefer the corruptionist view. This project ought to be of interest to anyone working on issues of personal identity, not only because hylemorphic views are historically important, but also because they are currently receiving significant attention in the personal identity literature. (shrink)

The correspondence between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins of 1706–8, while not well known, is a spectacularly good debate between a dualist and a materialist over the possibility of giving a materialist account of consciousness and personal identity. This article puts the Clarke Collins Correspondence in a broader context in which it can be better appreciated, noting that it is really a debate between John Locke and Anthony Collins on one hand, and Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler on the other. (...) Anthony Collins argues on behalf of John Locke's claim that it would be as easy for God to superadd the power of thinking to matter as for him to connect a soul to a body. Locke did not believe that matter could naturally produce thought or consciousness, but it was in God's power to make matter think. To defend Locke's claim Collins must defend the claim that there are emergent properties in the world – properties of a whole that are not possessed by the parts. Collins also defends a materialist version of Locke's account of personal identity against a variety of charges. Because the topics of debate in the correspondence are of such great interest to us, it deserves to be rescued from the neglect into which it fell and from which intellectual historians and philosophers have only recently and partially removed it. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a mode of concern with the question of personal identity in which the latter is raised as a problem of a practical order. What provokes this is a concern with the experience of discontinuity within the self and with the perception of continuity as a fragile and uncontrollable good. I discuss the relation which this practically oriented perspective bears to the philosophical form of engagement with personal identity, and the reasons which make the perspective of (...) the latter particularly enticing to the former, yet at the same time entirely inadequate to its needs. Finally, I consider how the need in question can instead appropriately be met, within a broader (and broadly Wittgensteinian) interest in the tendency of philosophical questions to mask—and thus sometimes betray—the need that inspires them. (shrink)

Historical introduction -- Human being -- Identity and human incompletion in Sartre -- Identity and human incompletion in Aquinas -- Human understanding -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Sartre -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Aquinas -- Human freedom -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Sartre -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Aquinas -- Human fulfillment -- The possibility of human happiness in Sartre -- The possibility of human happiness in (...) Aquinas. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in liberal circles that individual persons have a right to individual autonomy or self-determination. Each mentally competent adult has a right to be at liberty to live and shape their own life in accordance with their own view about what makes for a good life, free from undue coercion or interference by others, so long as they do not harm others. In the words of John Stuart Mill, mentally-competent persons should have the liberty of “framing the (...) plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they may think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong”. (shrink)