Abstract
In this article, we consider three metaphysical theories of personal identity: the soul theory, the body theory, and the psychological theory. Clinical cases are discussed as they present conceptual problems for each of these theories. For the soul theory, the case of Phineas Gage, and cases of pedophilic behavior due to a brain tumor are discussed. For the body theory, hypothetical cases of cephalosomatic anastomosis and actual cases of dicephalic parapagus and craniopagus parasiticus are discussed. For the psychological theory, cases of delusions and memory impairments are discussed. After a discussion of all these cases, we conclude that it is very difficult to unequivocally favor one of these theories, yet we argue that this discussion must be based not on abstract armchair speculation, but rather, consideration of real clinical cases.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 292. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Pub.
Asadi-Pooya, A. A., A. Sharan, M. Nei, and M. R. Sperling. 2008. Corpus Callosotomy. Epilepsy Behavior 13 (2): 271–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2008.04.020.
Barnes, Jonathan. 2002. The Presocratic Philosophers. 83. New York: Routledge.
Bondeson, Allen. 1989. Craniopagus parasiticus: Everard Home’s Two-Headed Boy of Bengal and Some Other Cases. Surgical Neurology. 31 (6): 426–434.
Bondeson, Jan. 2004. The Two-Headed Boy, and Other Medical Marvels. New York: Cornell University Press.
Bosmia, Anand. 2015. An Apocryphal Case of Craniopagus parasiticus: The Legend of Edward Mordake. Child’s Nervous System. 31 (12): 2211–2212.
Burns, J. M., and R. H. Swerdlow. 2003. Right Orbitofrontal Tumor With Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign. Archives of Neurology 60 (3): 437–440. https://doi.org/10.1001/archneur.60.3.437.
Connee, Earl, and Theodore Sider. 2007. Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics. 14. New York: Clarendon Press.
Copenhaver, Rebecca, Reid on Memory and Personal Identity. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/reid-memory-identity/.
Davis, Colleen. 2011. Conjoined Twins as Persons that can be Victims of Homicide. Medical Law Review 19 (3): 430–466.
Eysenck, Michael. 2014. Fundamentals of Psychology. 108. Routledge: Psychology Press.
Farrell, Helen. 2011. Dissociative Identity Disorder: Medicolegal Challenges. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. 39 (3): 402–406.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2016. Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience. New York: Harper Collins.
Gold, P. E. 2006. The Many Faces of Amnesia. Learning and Memory 13 (5): 506–514.
Hume, David.2010. A Treatise of Human Nature. Charleston: Nabu Press. 178.
Kihlstrom, J. F. 1994. Hypnosis, Delayed Recall, and the Principles of Memory. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 42 (4): 337–345.
Liao, Matthew. 2006. The Organism View Defended. The Monist 89 (3): 334–350.
Locke, John. 1849. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Tegg. 225.
Loftus, Elizabeth. 1988. Memory. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Lotfy, M., S. A. Sakr, and B. M. Ayoub. 2006. Successful Separation of Craniopagus parasiticus. Neurosurgery 59 (5): E1150. discussion E1150.
Machi, M. M., and J. N. Bruce. 2004. Human Pineal Physiology and Functional Significance of Melatonin. Frontiers Neuroendocrinology 25 (3–4): 177–195.
Martin, Sean. 2018. Head Transplant Recipient will Suffer Fate ‘WORSE THAN DEATH’. Express. https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/933920/Head-transplant-sergio-canavero-Valery-Spiridonov-Werdnig-Hoffmann-disease.
McAllister, M. M. 2000. Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Literature Review. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 7 (1): 25–33.
O’Driscoll, Kierand, and John Paul Leach. 1998. No Longer Gage: An Iron Bar Through the Head. Early Observations of Personality Change After Injury to the Prefrontal Cortex. British Medical Journal 317 (7174): 1673.
O’Driscoll, Kierand, and John Paul Leach. 1998. “No Longer Gage”: An Iron Bar Through the Head. Early Observations of Personality Change After Injury to the Prefrontal Cortex. BMJ 19; 317(7174): 1673–1674.
Olson, Eric. 2007. What are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olson, Eric. 2014. The Nature of People. In The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death, ed. S. Luper, 30–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oxenham, Simon. Don’t Be Taken in by the Nonsense Science of “Cell Memory Theory”. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/dont-be-taken-in-by-the-bad-science-of-cell-memory-theory.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pavone, Piero, Francesco Nigro, Raffaele Falsaperla, Filippo Greco, Martino Ruggieri, Renata Rizzo, Andrea Praticò, and Lorenzo Pavone. 2013. Hemihydranencephaly: Living with Half Braindysfunction. Italian Journal of Pediatrics 39: 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/1824-7288-39-3.
Pearsall, P., G. E. R. Schwartz, and L. G. S. Russek. 2002. Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors. Journal of Near-Death Studies 20: 191. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013009425905.
Redekop, Frederick. 2014. Psychoanalytic Approaches for Counselors. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Shelly, Bashkara. 2016. Footprints of Phineas Gage: Historical Beginnings on the Origins of Brain and Behavior and the Birth of Cerebral Localizationism. Archives of Medicine and Health Sciences. 4 (2): 280–286.
Shen, Helen. 2014. Inner Workings: Discovering the Split Mind. Proceedings of the National Academy Science USA 111 (51): 18097.
Shoemaker, Sydney. 2003. Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, R., and K. Higgins. 2009. The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy. 162. New York: Cengage Learning.
Spanos, N. 1994. Multiple Identity Enactments and Multiple Personality Disorder: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Psychological Bulletin. 116 (1): 143–165.
Squire, Larry. 2009. The Legacy of Patient HM for Neuroscience. Neuron 61(1):6–9.
Swinburne, Richard. 2004. The Existence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swinburne, Richard. 2010. Is There a God? 68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Horn, et al. 2012. Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage. PLoS ONE 7 (5): e37454.
Vining, E. P., et al. 1997. Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy-the Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996. Pediatrics 100 (2 Pt 1): 163–171.
Williams, Bernard. 1970. The Self and the Future. The Philosophical Review. 79 (2): 161–180.
Wlliams, Bernard. 1976. Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolpe, Robert. 2017. Ahead of Our Time: Why Head Transplantation is Ethically Unsupportable. AJOB Neuroscience. 8 (4): 206.
Xiaoping, Ren, Li Ming, Xin Zhao, Zehan Liu, Shuai Ren, Yafang Zhang, Shide Zhang, and Sergio Canavero. 2017. First Cephalosomatic anastomosis in a human model. Surgical Neurology International 8: 276.
Funding
This study was not funded.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
Gabriel Andrade declares that he/she has no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Andrade, G. Clinical cases and metaphysical theories of personal identity. Med Health Care and Philos 22, 317–326 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-018-9869-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-018-9869-3