A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can come together.

This paper aims to establish that Sorites reasoning, a fundamental part of Parfit's work, is more destructive that he intends. I establish the form that Parfit's arguments take and then substitute premises whose acceptability to Parfit I show. The new argument demonstrates an eliminativism or immaterialism concerning persons which Parfit must find repugnant.

. Book Reviews. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 403-421.

The debate on personal identity tends to conflate or ignore two different usages of the word ‘person’. Psychological‐continuity proponents concentrate upon its use to refer to human psychology or personality, while animalist critics prefer its use to refer to individual human beings. I argue that this duality undermines any attempt to see ‘person’ as a genuine sortal term. Instead, adopting suggestions found in Dennett and Sellars, I consider personhood as an ascription rather like an honorific title or achievement‐marker. I show (...) how the questions of identity for a regular honorific title like ‘genius’ inevitably supervene on identity‐questions concerning the more basic entity of ‘person’. I then argue by analogy that, if ‘person’ be regarded as an honorific on a par with ‘genius’, questions of personal identity over time necessarily collapse into questions of the continuing identity of human beings. Attempts to separate the continuity of a person from that of the human being who embodies it then founder on conceptual and referential incoherencies. Room is left for increasing the extension of personhood ascriptions to non‐humans in the future, while much that was previously puzzling about its behaviour as a concept is explained. At least some of the revisionist debate can now be seen more profitably as a debate about the moral and pragmatic considerations underlying non‐paradigm human continuity. (shrink)