This paper focuses on the connection between meaning, the specific field of phenomenological philosophy, and mattering, the cornerstone of personal identity. Doing so requires that we take a stand on the scope and method of phenomenological philosophy itself. I will argue that while we can describe our lives in an “impersonal” way, such descriptions will necessarily omit what makes it the case that such lives can matter at all. This will require distinguishing between “personal” identity (...) and “self” identity, an idea well-established in the phenomenological literature – for instance, in Husserl’s distinction between the “transcendental ego” and the person -- but I will argue that self-identity is a normative achievement whose clarification requires a move into second-person phenomenology. The argument moves through three sections. First, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch’s “non-egological” conception of consciousness and will explain the most important reason Husserl rejected this view in his transcendental phenomenology. Second, I will discuss some contemporary approaches to Husserl’s distinction between person and ego. Third, I will argue that these approaches testify to an ambiguity in Husserl’s account of being “true” to oneself that requires us to understand selfhood as having the structure Heidegger called care. The importance of this will be demonstrated phenomenologically in a critical examination of Paul Ricoeur’s ontology of selfhood, particularly his interpretation of the second-person phenomenology of conscience. (shrink)

Phineas Gage’s story is typically offered as a paradigm example supporting the view that part of what matters for personal identity is a certain magnitude of similarity between earlier and later individuals. Yet, reconsidering a slight variant of Phineas Gage’s story indicates that it is not just magnitude of similarity, but also the direction of change that affects personal identity judgments; in some cases, changes for the worse are more seen as identity-severing than (...) changes for the better of comparable magnitude. Ironically, thinking carefully about Phineas Gage’s story tells against the thesis it is typically taken to support. (shrink)

This paper presents a story that introduces the philosophical problem of personal identity in a way that students find clear and compelling. While the story neither offers a solution to the paradox it raises nor fully explores the relation of personal identity and “what matters” for prudence and responsibility, the story can be used to clear up initial confusions about personal identity and thereby provide a framework for organizing further reading and discussion. (...) Besides presenting this story, the paper provides a discussion of the pedagogical benefit of the use of paradox, offers a schematic account of the argument of the story, and addresses common student responses. (shrink)

_Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness_ is about persons and personal identity. What are we? And why does personal identity matter? Brian Garrett, using jargon-free language, addresses questions in the metaphysics of personal identity, questions in value theory, and discusses questions about the first person singular. Brian Garrett makes an important contribution to the philosophy of personal identity and mind, and to epistemology.

Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson (...) rejects several famous thought-experiments dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-SelfSteven HeineGereon Kopf. Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self. Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 298.Beyond Personal Identity by Gereon Kopf is in many ways a brilliant work of comparative philosophy that does an outstanding job in taking on the challenge of relating the complex thought (...) of Japanese giants Dōgen and Nishida to various Western conceptions of the person. Kopf succeeds in developing his own philosophical approach to the main issues of nonduality and present-oriented self-awareness, while staying true to the respective thinkers involved in the examination. He is clearly bucking recent trends in the field of Buddhist studies that have emphasized increasingly social-historical methods, but has pulled off a major coup by adhering to his vision of the role of scholarship. Along with Dan Lusthaus' Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-Shih Lun (Curzon, 2003), which deconstructs the issue of idealism, this work goes a along way toward rehabilitating philosophical approaches to Buddhist doctrine by analyzing text as text rather than trying to relate-and in some cases reduce-text to a reflection or expression of its reconstructed context. At the same time, Kopf's work, understandably as it is his first book, has some basic limitations, which I will address with constructive criticism.The main value of this book is that it takes the reader on a fascinating journey through a wide variety of Western and Buddhist notions of what constitutes the person and the person's relation to the world. Kopf's "theory of personal identity investigates three central questions: How is it possible to identify a person (myself and others) as an individual human being? How is it possible to distinguish between two individual persons? What guarantees the constancy and identity of an individual person over time?" (p. 7). Chapter 1 is primarily dedicated to critiquing Western notions that have substantialist implications, either deliberately and directly or indirectly in an embedded fashion by favoring an essentialist view that personal identity persists over time. Here Kopf demonstrates a mastery of contemporary philosophical materials and of how to examine them critically.The four chapters in part 2 of the book simultaneously unveil Kopf's theory of the tripartite structure of the person-selfhood, otherness, and continuity-and the reasons why he considers that Dōgen and Nishida overcome the flaws and lacunae in Western views of a false sense of constancy. The reason for the fourth chapter (chapter 5) is that Kopf goes into more depth on the third part of the structure, that is, the matter of how the person seems to maintain its identity over a prolonged period, by dividing this into the issues of "continuity of experience" and "temporality." In each chapter, he makes it clear how Dōgen and Nishida appropriate the basic Buddhist doctrines of no-self, dependent origination, and impermanence in formulating their unique perspectives. He convincingly shows that Dōgen's notion of [End Page 569] the dharma-stage (jū-hōi) as articulated in the "Genjōkōan" and Nishida's notion of the discontinuity of continuity stake out the distinctive Zen view. According to Kopf, "the Zen Buddhist notion of immediate now and non-relative present should not be mistaken for a merely atemporal oneness, which melts all individual time-moments into an undifferentiated oneness, but rather as the dialectic of linear temporality and mystical atemporality" (p. 198).In part 3 Kopf fleshes out the meaning of the Zen phenomenology of temporal existence as the central component of a philosophy of personal identity-or, rather, of transpersonal nonessentialist experience-by providing a highly original interpretation of Dōgen's doctrines of the "presencing" (genjō) of "total-working" (zenki) in light of Nishida's paradox or self-contradictory identity of "walking eastward by walking westward." He concludes with a stimulating comparison of Derek Parfit's survivalist philosophy, which represents a Western approach to present-oriented experience, with the Zen view that "the experiential 'I' discovers in its process of self-awakening that it does not... (shrink)

Nancy Jecker and Andrew Ko (2017) wish to present an account of personal identity which captures what matters to the patient and places the patient at the center of medical decisions. They focus particularly on medical interventions in the brain that can cause drastic changes in personality; under what circumstances should we say the patient has 'survived' these changes? More specifically, how can we best understand the notion of survival in a way that captures (...) class='Hi'>what is of concern to the patient? This goal is laudable, however, their chosen account of narrative identity is ill-suited to this task for one reason in particular; it does not give sufficient guidance in predicting which medical decisions are likely to be experienced as disruptive to identity. (shrink)

Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In (...) this paper, I argue that Parfit is mistaken about this last step. His revisionary arguments about personal identity and rationality have no implications for moral theory. We need not decide whether Relation R or personal identity contain what matters if we want to retain the importance of the separateness of persons. (shrink)

Through careful analysis of a specific example, Parfit’s ‘fission argument’ for the unimportance of personal identity, I argue that our judgements concerning imaginary scenarios are likely to be unreliable when the scenarios involve disruptions of certain contingent correlations. Parfit’s argument depends on our hypothesizing away a number of facts which play a central role in our understanding and employment of the very concept under investigation; as a result, it fails to establish what Parfit claims, namely, that (...) class='Hi'>identity is not what matters. I argue that Parfit’s conclusion can be blocked without denying that he has presented an imaginary case where prudential concern would be rational in the absence of identity. My analysis depends on the recognition that the features that explain or justify a relation may be distinct from the features that underpin it as necessary conditions. (shrink)

Derek Parfit played a crucial role in the XX century philosophical debate. His masterpiece, Reasons and Persons, has been highly influential both in moral philosophy, and personal identity. It is hard to overlook the fact that Parfit’s ideas gave the main contribution to the contemporary philosophy of persons. He reformulates a debate stuck in the classical contraposition between psychological and physical criteria of personal identity, by introducing his most famous idea: identity doesn’t matter in survival. (...) This thesis, and its moral implications, has been a challenge for everyone tackling the issues related to persons and normative moral philosophy. (shrink)

It has been argued that 'brain bisection' data leads us to abandon our traditional conception of personal identity. Nagel has remarked: The ultimate account of the unity of what we call a single mind consists of an enumeration of the types of functional integration that typify it. We know that these can be eroded in different ways and to different degrees. The belief that even in their complete version they can be explained by the presence of a (...) numerically single subject is an i1lusion.l Parfit has adopted a similar position, contending that patients with 'split brains' become two separate 'streams of consciousness' and thus that our normal sense of personal identity, or at least 'what matters' about personal identity is constituted by psychological relations between connected conscious experiences2 It is claimed that in 'split brain' patients certain of the relations are disrupted and that we thus see clearly that the nature of the unity that is normally present does not reside in a single subject with a given identity, but in the connectedness and continuity that normally obtains. Parfit draws on two sources of support for these contentions: the first is the actual events that transpire after a human being is submitted to the operation of sectioning the corpus callosum (or 'brain bisection'), and the second is the imaginative consideration of various scenarios involving graded mental and physical discontinuity, and the 'fission' and 'fusion' of persons. I shall do little more than argue that the actual data will not sustain the interpretation put on them. (shrink)

Your replica is created on Mars and you, on Earth, are destroyed. Parfit claims that your replica may still have what prudentially matters for you – provided that you are psychologically connected and continuous with your replica. If someone accidentally destroys the tapes containing your psychological profile used in the production of your replica and this same action fortuitously produces a functionally equivalent tape, Ehring claims that Parfit should maintain that the resulting new individual may still have (...) class='Hi'>what matters. Nihilism about what matters follows, or so Ehring claims. I argue that Ehring is wrong and that the difference between the two ways of creating a replica is not trivial – there is no trivial survival. (shrink)

We argue that animalism is the only materialist account of personal identity that can account for the autonomy that we typically think of ourselves as possessing. All the rival materialist theories suffer from a moral version of the problem of too many thinkers when they posit a human person that overlaps a numerically distinct human animal. The different persistence conditions of overlapping thinkers will lead them to have interests that conflict, which in many cases prevents them both from (...) autonomously forming and acting on the same intentions. These problems are exacerbated by problems of self-reference plaguing the overlapping thinkers. We contend that the impossibility of simultaneous autonomous action by animals and persons provides a reason to favor animalism over Neo-Lockeanism, Four-Dimensionalism, Constitution theory, and brain-size views of the person. We anticipate and reject arguments that the autonomy of the person and the animal can be shown to be compatible by relying upon either the Parfitian thesis that identity isn’t what matters or claiming that animals acquire the interests of the person they constitute. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;In this thesis I argue that we ought to accept some version of the Analysis view--the view that the identity of a person over time can be analysed in terms of physical and/or psychological continuities. I also argue that there is no sense in which we ought to be ontological reductionists about persons--a person is an essentially embodied, irreducible, entity whose identity over time is analysable in (...) terms of physical and psychological continuities. ;I argue that any plausible theory of personal identity over time is a best-candidate theory, which implies that the identity of a person over time can be extrinsically determined. Some philosophers find this consequence absurd; but I claim that they have no good reason to. I also show how reference to the extrinsicness of identity features in a powerful argument for Derek Parfit's thesis that identity is not "what matters". Finally, I argue that there are plausible counter-examples to all versions of the Physical and Psychological Criteria of personal identity, and that we ought to accept a version of the Mixed Criterion which acknowledges the importance of both sorts of continuity, but which assigns greater weight to the relation of psychological continuity. (shrink)

As regards the question of what matters in survival two views have been identified: on the one hand, we have the view that what matters is identity (the so-called 'commonsense view') and, on the other hand, we have the view that what matters is the holding of certain psychological connections between various mental states over time (the relation R). Several attempts have tried to reconcile these two views involving the so-called 'multiple occupancy view' (...) or 'cohabitation thesis'. Even if the latter comes in several formulations, common elements are, positing the appropriateness of a description of the fission case according to which the post-fission persons existed prior to fission and also, that what determines that two persons who exist at a certain time are distinct can be facts about what is the case at other times. The paper discusses three of the most influential formulations of the multiple occupancy view, which intend to reconcile identity with what matters, and argues that for various reasons these at least do not work in this regard. (shrink)

This study is about what matters in survival--about what relation to a future individual gives you a reason for prudential concern for that individual. For common sense there is such a relation and it is identity, but according to Parfit common sense is wrong in this respect. Identity is not what matters in survival. In What Matters in Survival, Douglas Ehring argues that this Parfitian thesis does not go far enough. The (...) result is the highly radical view "Survival Nihilism," according to which nothing matters in survival. Although we generally have motivating reasons to have prudential concern, and perhaps even indirect normative reasons for such concerns there is no relation that gives you a basic, foundational normative reason for prudential concern. This view goes beyond what Parfit calls the Extreme View. It is the More Extreme View and is in effect something like an error theory about prudential reason as a special kind of normative reason. (shrink)

As regards the question of what matters in survival two views have been identified: on the one hand, we have the view that what matters is identity (the so-called ?commonsense view?) and, on the other hand, we have the view that what matters is the holding of certain psychological connections between various mental states over time (the relation R). Several attempts have tried to reconcile these two views involving the so-called ?multiple occupancy view? (...) or ?cohabitation thesis?. Even if the latter comes in several formulations, common elements are, positing the appropriateness of a description of the fission case according to which the post-fission persons existed prior to fission and also, that what determines that two persons who exist at a certain time are distinct can be facts about what is the case at other times. The paper discusses three of the most influential formulations of the multiple occupancy view, which intend to reconcile identity with what matters, and argues that for various reasons these at least do not work in this regard. (shrink)

This article examines Derek Parfit's claim in Reasons and Persons that personal identity consists in non-branching psychological continuity with the right kind of cause. It argues that such psychological accounts of our identity fail, but that their main rivals, biological or animalist accounts do not fare better. Instead it proposes an error-theory to the effect that common sense takes us to be identical to our bodies on the erroneous assumption that our minds belong non-derivatively to them, whereas (...) they in fact belong to them derivatively in virtue of belonging to some proper parts of them, namely certain features of their brains. However, these features do not meet another necessary condition of being the subject or owner of our minds: the condition of being “accessible” so that we can attribute our mental states to them in everyday life. There is also the problem of specifying these features more precisely. Nothing meets these two conditions, so we are not identical to anything. This conclusion fits well with Parfit's claim that personal identity is not what matters. But although this negative claim is true, it is suggested that Parfit's positive account of what matters is mistaken: it is rather psychological similarity than psychological continuity/connectedness that matters. (shrink)

The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more recently, practitioners within (...) an emerging discipline, experimental philosophical bioethics or “bioxphi”—the focus of this chapter—have adopted a similar aim and employed similar methodologies, but with two distinctive features: (a) a special concern for enhanced ecological validity in the examples and populations studied; and (b) an interest in contributing to substantive normative debates within the wider field of bioethics. Our aim in this chapter is to sample illustrative work on personal identity in bioxphi, explore how it relates to studies in psychology covering similar terrain, and draw out the implications of this work for matters of bioethical concern. In pursuing these issues, we highlight recent work in bioxphi that includes the perceived validity of advance directives following neurodegeneration, the right of psychologically altered study participants to withdraw from research, how drug addiction may cause one to be regarded by others as “a completely different person,” the effect of deep-brain stimulation on perceptions of the self, and the potential influence of moral enhancement interventions on intuitive impressions of a person’s character. (shrink)

David lewis has argued that--Despite the 'fission' cases--One may consistently hold both that what matters in survival is "mental continuity and connectedness" and that what matters in survival is identity. To prove his point, He produces a certain theory of persons. Derek parfit and penelope maddy have objected that the theory lewis produces does not actually have the advantages he claims for it. In this paper, The author questions their objections, And then argues that, Even (...) though lewis's theory has many virtues, No sufficiently knowledgeable person can be justified in accepting it (here and now) as an adequate theory of persons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Personal Identity and the Moral Authority of Advance DirectivesAndrea OttSection 1What is the metaphysical basis for respecting an advance directive first drawn up by an individual who is competent but who is at present rendered incapacitated?1 What are the roles of autonomy, personal values, integrity, and beneficence contained within said respect? In this section the positions of two prominent philosophers, Ronald Dworkin and Jeff McMahan, (...) will be analyzed with regard to the above questions. While the two thinkers have different scholastic orientations—with Dworkin primarily a philosopher of law and McMahan an ethicist and metaphysician—their conclusions regarding the respect of the wishes of the competent-turned-demented are remarkably similar. Namely, they both argue that the values and desires held by the previously competent agent trump any current (contrary) wishes. What this amounts to for Dworkin involves respecting the autonomy of the dominant, competent part of the life where countermanding such autonomy would be worse for the life as a whole. For McMahan this means respecting the precedent autonomy generated by the deep prudential unity relations which form the basis for egoistic concern; this concern is often the basis for drafting a directive regarding future care in the first place.I will argue in this paper that if McMahan is to be consistent with his position regarding prudential unity relations then he will, in fact, not arrive at the same conclusion as Dworkin.2 Consistency will demand that the demented patient’s directive should not be followed because the demented individual will, at best, be only weakly connected to the previously autonomous, decision-capable agent. Therefore, I will argue, the moral authority [End Page 38] of the advance directive will be similarly weakened. According to McMahan, Dworkin maintains that the precedent autonomous decision has moral authority, for he assumes that the individual in question is understood to be one “temporally extended individual,” so that what is best for her life now will, in fact, be what is best for her life as a whole (501). McMahan claims to support Dworkin’s conclusion, albeit for different reasons. McMahan supports the execution of the directive out of some sort of respect for the earlier “reasonably full and complete life with its own deep prudential unity” (502). I argue that McMahan, though ostensibly in agreement with Dworkin, will have to acknowledge that the weakened prudential unity relations which make the life as a whole matter less will also undercut the moral authority of the directive. In other words, the moral authority of an advance directive weakens as the prudential unity relations weaken.Ultimately, I believe, Lynne Baker and her metaphysics of constitution can provide the best direction when faced with dilemmas such as The Advance Directive. Baker can do this and avoid the charge of positing a “post-person” (the basis for McMahan’s criticism of other versions of psychological accounts of personal identity). I use her metaphysics of constitution and derivative properties within a novel explanation of prudential concern for the organism without positing identity. I argue, in section 2, that the organism made the decision for advance care when it was derivatively (in Baker’s sense) a person. We can thus avoid the charges of (1) new entities “popping” into existence and (2) a person binding a nonperson. Such a metaphysics of constitution may thus offer some hope of adjudication within debate concerning these matters.Now I shall turn to the thought experiment in The Ethics of Killing that forms the basis of this discussion. True to the general style of his work, Jeff McMahan asks the reader to consider a thought experiment. To avoid any misinterpretation of the facts, I reproduce The Advance Directive in full below:A woman whose life has been devoted to creative intellectual work finds herself in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Given her nature, her values, and the character of her previous life, she believes that for her to continue to live in a demented state would be horribly degrading, worse than simply ceasing to exist. She accepts, however, that her life will continue to be worth living as long as she remains competent; therefore to commit... (shrink)

Moral responsibility seems to presuppose personal identity. However, there are problems with this view, raised by Derek Parfit’s arguments for the view that personal identity isn’t what matters for our practical concerns. While Parfit discusses moral responsibility only in passing, the problems that arise for the connection between moral responsibility and personal identity have recently been sharpened by David Shoemaker. This paper defends the claim that moral responsibility presupposes personal identity (...) against these problems. It argues, first, that only reductionist views about personal identity have problems with the connection between responsibility and identity, which suggests that personal identity is a non-reductionist concept. Second, it argues that while non-reductionism is problematic, there is a novel view—non-representationalism about personal identity, according to which we account for personal identity in terms of a distinctive non-representational function—that is equally well-positioned to rescue the connection as non-reductionism, without suffering from non-reductionism’s problems. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] In this paper, I present an interpretation on how Hume can escape from his intellectual ordeal concerning personal identity in the Appendix of the Treatise. First of all, I present the source of Hume’s despair to offer an interpretation on what would have truly bothered Hume in the Appendix, and I identify several lines of interpretation. Recently Jonathan Ellis has distinguished various ways of understanding Hume’s predicament. Of the (...) four groups of explanations that Ellis distinguishes, in this paper I elaborate on the three that Ellis does not sufficiently explicate, addressing some key issues that Ellis missed. Last, I offer an alternative reading of Hume’s difficulty, based on Dennett’s ideas on the matter, and make a suggestion about what Hume ought to have said about these problems. (shrink)

This paper offers a challenge to Derek Parfit's thesis that one ought to have no preference between these two otherwise identical situations: 1. I continue to go on living as before, and 2. I do not survive, but am replaced by a duplicate, psychologically continuous to my present self (i.e. an R‐related duplicate). I point out that virtually all psychologically normal persons regard some inanimate objects as being ‘irreplaceable’ (such that no copy could adequately substitute). I then propose that in (...) every such case, this judgment is based on the subject's regarding some person as likewise irreplaceable. It would follow that any such subject would have to reject Parfit's thesis. (shrink)

Presents actual cases of brain bisection; how we might be able to divide and reunite our minds; what explains the unity of consciousness at any time; the imagined case of full division, in which each half of our brain would be successfully transplanted into the empty skull of another body; why neither of the resulting people would be us; why this would not matter, since our relation to each of these people contains what matters in the prudential (...) sense, giving us reasons to care about these people, which are like our reasons to care about our own future;and how it is hard to believe that personal identity, or our own continued existence, is not what matters. (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)

In the Appendix to his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume expressed his dissatisfaction with his treatment of the topic of personal identity. Unfortunately, he was not altogether forthcoming about what was bothering him, and, as a result, a variety of interpretations have been put forward on this matter. The suggestion presented in this chapter is that Hume's difficulties about personal identity are grounded in a rejection of the notion of a substantial soul or self in (...) which ideas could inhere. Moreover, Hume also thinks that ideas themselves count as substances and thus neither need to nor can adhere in something else. Given this degree of separateness and looseness, it seems impossible to give any account of how the notion of personal identity could arise. (shrink)

Much specific support for theories of personal identity comes from data which is really about 'what matters' in identity. I argue that if we accept Parfit's arguments that identity is not sufficient for what matters, then we should think our subject matter is actually underdetermined and indefinite, and there can be no correct answer to the question 'Under what conditions is P2 identical to P!?'.

We have a strong intuition that personal identity is a determinate relationship. Parfit famously challenged this intuition. In this paper I explain how narrative identity theories can face that challenge and defend that personal identity is determinate thanks to what I call the social narrativity thesis. This move will raise some concerns regarding the also strong intuition that personal identity is what matters when we care about our future existence. I (...) address this concern to show that narrative identity theories can account for both intuitions at the same time. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend an answer to the following question in the diachronic personal identity debate: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for our persistence over time? Two popular approaches to answering this question are the psychological and the somatic approach. On the former approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of psychological continuity. So, some proponents of the psychological approach think that we cease to exist if we lose certain features of our psychology (...) such as our memories, beliefs, and rationality. On the latter approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of physical continuity. Eric Olson defends a version of the somatic approach called animalism. On his view, we are numerically identical to biological organisms and we persist if and only if the organisms we are persist. Although Olson’s animalism has some benefits, it also faces some challenges. For example, many people would say that we go wherever our brains go (if we go anywhere at all) because our brains (more specifically, our cerebra) realize the aspects of our psychology traditionally associated with persons, such as memories, beliefs, rationality, and self-awareness. But on Olson’s animalism, our psychology has nothing to do with our persistence and we go wherever our bodies go rather than our cerebra. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, I lay out an animalist view of our persistence called hylomorphic animalism. On this view, we are numerically identical to rational animals, which are living bodies composed of prime matter and a rational soul. Furthermore, we persist if and only if the composite of matter and rational soul persists. I claim that hylomorphic animalism makes better sense of certain contemporary personal identity thought experiments than Olson’s animalism. For example, contra Olson, I argue that our psychology does have something to do with our persistence and that we go wherever our brains go. (shrink)

Derek Parfit influentially defends reductionism about persons, the view that a person’s existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of physical and mental events. Yet some critics, particularly Mark Johnston, have raised powerful objections to Parfit’s reductionism. In this paper, I defend reductionism against Johnston. In particular, I defend a radical form of reductionism that Buddhist philosophers developed. Buddhist reductionism can justify key features of Parfit’s position, such as the claims (...) that personal identity is not what matters and can also be indeterminate. Furthermore, Buddhist reductionism can avoid Johnston’s objections to Parfit’s reductionism. I conclude that reductionists have good reasons to favor Buddhist reductionism over Parfit’s version. (shrink)

What am I? And what is my relationship to the thing I call ‘my body’? Thus each of us can pose for himself the philosophical problems of the nature of the self and the relationship between a person and his body. One answer to the question about the relationship between a person and the thing he calls ‘his body’ is that they are two things composed of the same matter at the same time (like a clay statue and (...) the piece of clay which presently constitutes it). This is the ‘constitution view’. In this paper we give a novel overview of the literature on personal identity, the constitution view, and surrounding topics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:746 BOOK REVIEWS they he systematic, well-founded, inter-subjective, free, and critical. Unfortunately for the argument, such criteria require a theory of the good as well as of the true. No survey of the literature alone will yield these criteria; reasoned decisions about larger matters must be made. Vroom's inability to decide the meta-questions about truth and goodness is less significant in his final chapter on inter-religious dialogue, where (...) he looks for a schema of mutual understanding rather than for norms of successful communication. The stress on family resemblance helps him to avoid two mistakes. First is the idea that all religions are variations on one universal human activity, a position made untenable by the multitude of concerns embraced by every religious tradition and the absence of any one integrating feature. The second mistake he escapes is the belief that every religion is a unit having no overlap with any other and that consequently dialogue is impossible. Religions and the Truth traces the major world traditions so carefully that the overlap is obvious, hut it also makes clear that the overlap is various and fluctuating. Vroom has made a major contribution to the understanding of religion and to the conversation of religious people. My one wish is that he had been brave enough to take a stand on the basic philosophical questions and that he had set in motion an interaction between these questions and his detailed analysis of religion. An investigation of these deepest and richest quests for the true, the good, and the beautiful would result in an even better view of religion. La SaUe University Philadelphia, Pa. MICHAEL J. KERLIN Persons and Personal Identity: A Contemporary Inquiry. Edited by ARTHUR PEACOCKE AND GRANT GILLETT. Ian Ramsey Centre Publication, no. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Pp. ix + 222. $39.95 (cloth). This hook contains thirteen papers given at a seminar series and workshop on " Conceptions of the Person and Their Ethical Implications " held under the aegis of the Ian Ramsey Centre in Oxford, Eng· land, in 1985-86. The Ian Ramsey Centre, founded in 1985 and based at St. Cross College in Oxford, is directed by Arthur Peacocke, one of the editors of this hook. The Centre has as its aim " the interdiscipli· nary study of both ethical problems arising from scientific and medical research and practice and the underlying philosophical and theological BOOK REVIEWS 747 issues" (p. vii). The range of contributions to this volume shows that this aim is being taken seriously. Five contributions are by philos· ophers, three by theologians, and one each by a chemist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a literary critic, and a legal theorist. In addition, some of the papers have appended to them a partial record of the discussions they prompted, and the participants in these discussions represent a still broader range of disciplines. One of the chief strengths of this collection is thus the unusually wide spectrum of iITtellectual interests it covers. This is also its weakness; diversity can easily become disjointedness. The dominant tone of the collection nevertheless is philosophical, and the parameters of the philosophical debate are set by the first two con· tributions. In the first, Peter Atkins presents a radically scientistic materialism as the only possible view of what human persons are. Science, he claims, is omnicompetent and simple; purposelessness and chaos are fundamental in the cosmos; and physicalist reductionism. is capable of explaining everything. Atkins attempts to show, in the body of his paper, that these claims are true by offering a physicalist explanation of qualia and intentionality. Atkins's paper is remarkable both for the fervor of its rhetoric and the implausibility of its conclusions: any position that is not radically scientistic and physicalist is dismissed as sentimental wishful thinking (p. 13). But Atkins never establishes that nonphysicalist explanations of some phenomena are made less plau· sible by the fact that physicalist explanations can also be offered. Richard Swinburne, in the second paper, gives us the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. He argues that if it is logically possible that I, as a conscious person, can exist without a body, then it follows that I have a soul (see... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Being Sure of One's Self: Hume on Personal Identity1 Corliss Gayda Swain A number of papers recently published on Hume's theory of personal identityhavebeen devoted to the question: Whyin the Appendix to the Treatise did Hume express complete or acute dissatisfaction with his account of personal identity in book 1 of that work?2 In this paper I shall argue that no adequate answer can be (...) given to this question because its presupposition—namely, that Hume discovered some reason to be dissatisfied with his account—is false. My thesis is that Hume did not write the section ofthe Appendix dealing with personal identity in order to raise new questions about the adequacy ofhisbook 1 account of the mind; he wrote it in order to defend that account by showing that alternative explanations of personal identity are incoherent.3 Very briefly, this defense is as follows. In the Appendix Hume considers two hypotheses concerning the nature of the human mind: the first is the hypothesis accepted by many of the modern philosophers, namely, that the mind is a thinking substance which is both unitary and simple; the secondis Hume's own account ofpersonal identity, according to which "the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system ofdifferent perceptions or different existences, which are link'd togetherby the relation ofcause and effect."4 Drawing on arguments he had developed in Treatise 1.4.5 and 6, Hume shows in the Appendix that the first hypothesis, while pretending to account for the identityand simplicityofthe selfin terms ofamental substance and to offer a new foundation for knowledge, actually leads us into the same labyrinth of obscurities and contradictions in which the ancient philosophy was involved when it tried to account for the identity and simplicity of material objects in terms of material substances. The modern philosophy tried to solve the same kind of problem as did the ancients, using the same kind of resources as the ancients used, and for this reason it is involved in the same contradictions and obscurities when it tries to explain the nature of the mind as the ancients were when they tried to explain the nature of matter. Hume's response to this situationisnotmerelytorejectbothmetaphysical systemsbutalso to reject their formulation of the problems ofidentity through change and unity in diversity and thè attendant criterion ofadequacy for the solution. Hume is sceptical that the problem which both the ancient Volume XVII Number 2 107 CORLISS GAYDA SWAIN andthemodernmetaphysicians setthemselves canbe solved,5but this does not mean that he is sceptical about personal identity or his own account ofit. In book 1 Hume had argued that a proper understanding ofthe real problem of personal identity leads to a real solution. In the Appendix he is concerned to show that this solution is not a solution to the (insoluble) problem that so preoccupied the metaphysicians. It is Hume's insistence that the metaphysicians' problem is insoluble that seems to have led commentators to think that Hume was dissatisfied with his own solution to the problem ofpersonal identity. On this view, the labyrinth ofcontradictions in which Hume finds himselfin the Appendix is not a labyrinth he gets into upon accepting his own account of personal identity, but rather a labyrinth he finds himself in without that account. What the Appendix adds to Hume's positive account of personal identity is a clear statement of the destructive argument againstmetaphysical systems that try to have it both ways. Thus, the Appendix should be read not as a renunciation but as a defense. I. Hume's "Renunciation" Commentators who hold that Hume found a new problem that was connected with his book 1 account of personal identity seem to have some strong textual support for their view.6 In the introductory paragraph of the section in the Appendix dealing with personal identity, Hume says, "But upon a more strict review of the section concerningpersonal identity, I find myselfinvoWd in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent" (T 633).7 He confesses that his account ofpersonal identity is "very defective" (T 635) and claims that... (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a number of issues related to a life lived with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Primarily, I am interested in discussing how one unwillingly changes their personal identity by forced medicating—demanded by others implicitly and explicitly. My motivation is something deep and invasive in me. I want to know, I have always wanted to know, why others want me to not be Me so badly. I have thought about this question for years, and though (...) others may simply chalk it up to just one of the standard paranoid or narcissistic traits of borderline personality disorder, there is something more to this question that many of us agonize over most of our lives. There is a deeply normative component to this question that extends beyond the mere fear of abandonment; it is tied to a desire by others to erase—literally—who we are for their own comfort. In this sense, then, I invite you to travel along a path of what it can mean to be a BPDer, from a narrative, phenomenological, and cognitive lived, embodied perspective. My purpose is to show that the treatments for us that others desire cannot avoid (and usually do not want to avoid) the unraveling of who we really are. Whether we want to or not, we give up our self to keep other people with us. And for many, this is too much to ask, and can be one, though not the only, reason suicide and self‐harm seem to be necessary recourses. One in 10 people with BPD commit suicide. So this is a serious matter, indeed. (shrink)

ALBERT SHALOM PROPOSES that a framework for understanding mind and personal identity more adequate than either idealistic or traditional materialistic frameworks can be found in a quasi-materialist theory. In The Body/mind Conceptual Framework and the Problem of Personal Identity he criticizes most formulations of the materialist thesis, yet maintains that the physical has in a sense to be taken as ontologically primary. His is a dialectical concept of matter: a concept related to two types of time, (...) linear and what he calls "quasi-nonlinear time." The formulations of the notions of time and of the physical develop through his criticisms and what he calls "the elaboration of those basic conditions without which it would be impossible, in my view, to even conceive of an ultimately convincing theory of what we call 'the person'." The elaboration turns out to imply physicalism, but an ontologically opaque physicalism. This opacity is based on an analysis of physical existence per se as incomprehensible. (shrink)

Given research and public interest for conditions related to an extended lifespan, we addressed the questions of what matters and what matters most for subsequent survival past age 80. The data was drawn from the population-based and multidisciplinary Swedish OCTO Twin Study, in which a sample consisting of identical and same-sex fraternal twin pairs, followed from age 80 until death, provided detailed data on health, physical functioning, life style, personality, and sociodemographic conditions. Information concerning date of (...) birth and death were obtained from population census register. We estimated heritability using an ACE model and evaluated the role of multiple predictors for the mortality-related hazard rate using Cox regression. Our findings confirmed a low heritability of 12%. As expected, longer survival was associated with being a female, an apolipoprotein E e4 allele non-carrier, and a non-smoker. Several diseases were found to be associated with shorter survival as well as certain health conditions. Stronger grip and better lung function, as well as better vision, and better cognitive function was related to longer survival. Social embeddedness, better self-evaluated health, and life-satisfaction were also significantly associated with longer survival. After controlling for the impact of comorbidity, functional markers, and personality-related predictors, we found that sex, cerebrovascular diseases, compromised cognitive functioning, self-related health, and life-satisfaction remained as strong predictors. Cancer was only associated with the mortality hazard when accounting for other co-morbidities. The survival estimates were mostly in anticipated directions and contained effect sizes within the expected range. Noteworthy, we found that some of the so-called “soft-markers” remained strong predictors, despite a control for other factors. For example, self-evaluation of health and ratings of life-satisfaction provide additional and valuable information. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to disentangle both Parfit’s and Whitehead’s views on personal identity. Issues regarding what it means to be a singular individual, how a person can remain the same over time, and what makes an individual an original being with specific characteristics will be examined.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

Derek Parfit est célèbre pour avoir soutenu que l'identité personnelle ne comptait pas pour déterminer la survie d'une personne. Sa phrase « personal identity is not what matters » est inspirée d'une approche réductionniste de l'identité personnelle qui consiste à dire que la personne humaine se réduit à un corps, un cerveau et une série d'événements mentaux causalement liés. Dans cette optique, ce qui compte, c'est la continuité psychologique. Cet article vise à montrer que dans des (...) dynamiques de reconnaissances, l'identité personnelle peut compter dans la définition de l'identité personnelle à travers le temps ; en deux mots, que l'identité personnelle compte. Partant des conceptions narrativistes défendues par Paul Ricoeur et Charles Taylor, j'en viens à défendre une théorie constructiviste-institutionnaliste de l'identité personnelle qui prend en considération le caractère institué et construit de l'identité personnelle. Le but de cet article est donc de défendre la thèse selon laquelle l'identité personnelle compte pour dans les réflexions éthiques et politiques. (shrink)

Memory modification technologies (MMTs)—interventions within the memory affecting its functions and contents in specific ways—raise great therapeutic hopes but also great fears. Ethicists have expressed concerns that developing and using MMTs may endanger the very fabric of who we are—our personal identity. This threat has been mainly considered in relation to two interrelated concerns: truthfulness and narrative self‐constitution. In this article, we propose that although this perspective brings up important matters concerning the potential aftermaths of MMT utilization, (...) it fails to tell the whole story. We suggest that capturing more tangible potential consequences of MMT use, namely, its psychological ramifications is crucial both in ethical considerations and in making decisions regarding the permissibility of such interventions. To this end, we first examine what current MMTs are capable of and what are the prospects of emerging MMTs. Subsequently, we outline the relationship between memory and personal identity; specifically, we indicate that concepts of self‐defining memories and narrative identity are crucial to considering how MMTs may influence one's psychological functioning. On this basis, we analyze potential consequences of narrative disruption that may be the result of the use of MMTs; more precisely, we consider its potential effects on mental health, well‐being, and personal agency, and outline the ethical dilemmas that decision‐makers face in this context. We conclude by considering the broader cultural context that may have influence on policymaking regarding permissibility of memory modification interventions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 157-159 [Access article in PDF] Constructing Persons:The Psychopathology of Identity Stephen R. L. Clark Keywords identity, legal fictions, materialism, psychopathology. Steve Matthews argues that the criteria proposed by Stephen Behnke and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for establishing personal identity in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are flawed. Neither brain identity nor memory convergence are adequate grounds for ascribing (...) identity, even in the absence of DID. Someone suffering from DID is no less responsible than a drunkard for the crimes she commits when not in her right—or at least her usual—mind, and perhaps no more responsible than someone suffering from some other mental disorder. We may decide to punish someone suffering from DID for her crimes only when she and her presumed alter both share a brain (as obviously they do) and might—at least after therapy—have memories in common, and only when the alternate personality that led to the crime is herself sane. But we should not pretend to ourselves that this judgment rests upon a clear and uncontentious notion of identity.It may be that Matthews still shares too much of his opponents' attitude: namely, that there is some matter of fact about identity, or at least some fact about the central principles by which we ascribe or recognize identity. This, at first sight, is the force of his counterexamples: that the Behnke/Sinnott-Armstrong criteria give counterintuitive results and so cannot exactly map the notion that we have in mind. Just so Socrates was able to prove that Justice did not consist in Paying One's Debts, because we would all at once acknowledge that it was not Just (or Right) to restore his sword to a homicidal maniac (or at least that there were real doubts about who it was that really owned the sword). But neither Socrates' nor Matthews' conclusion need be referred to any simple fact. It would not be sensible to say that the maniac had a right to have his sword, or that its keeper had a duty to return it, because we recognize implicitly that the very point of Justice is to do Good. Correspondingly, maybe the real effect of Matthews's counterexamples is to remind us what the point of Judgment is. Is there any matter of fact about identity, or is identity simply a way of saying who it is that should now be held responsible? Joe is not to be held responsible because he is the same person as the one who committed the crime: he is reckoned the same person because he is the one who is here now to be held responsible. That is what it is to be the same person: to be held responsible for what is personally done. [End Page 157]Someone who is not a person at all is not the same person as anyone (although they may be the same creature). And a person is a creature who holds herself responsible, or can do so: who has memories and anticipations to which she lays claim, appropriates as her own. This in turn is possible because (or so it seems) she has acquired the necessary words and customs: because she sees people being held responsible she can also hold herself responsible—or sometimes disclaim all responsibility. She will not always be allowed to escape all blame or credit, merely because her memories are of a self that no longer makes much sense to her, nor even because she has no memories at all of what was done. But this need not be because she is objectively the very same person as the sometime agent; rather, the person she is taken to be is constructed by the legal and moral attitudes of those who judge her. Those attitudes are not necessarily determinate: how exactly the ordinary rules apply in novel cases may be a matter of decision rather than discovery. The connections that ordinarily ground or specify identity are not robust enough to rely upon in DID patients (that, after all, is the trouble). We have to make... (shrink)

This article considers whether process philosophy can provide a more promising basis for understanding the closely related problems of persons and personal identity than more traditional or mainstream philosophical approaches. In particular, the article focuses on whether process conceptions of persons and personal identity provide an approach that offers greater potential for resolving the duplication and fission examples within the literature in this area than the approaches taken by Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit.

This paper's ?I examines Derek Parfit's main, metaphysical, argument for reductionism about personal identity. ?II considers three possible ethical arguments for reductionism, and suggests a new approach to the question of what matters about personal identity which has to do with the notion of an ethical narrative.

Martha Nussbaum subscribes to the view that our identity is an evaluative question determined by our common, deeply held beliefs about what is worthwhile in human life. In so doing, she asserts that for an account of ethics to have “philosophical power” it needs to be grounded in an account of human nature that is both evaluative and internal. I focus on Nussbaum's claim that personal identity has to include the necessary features of practical rationality and (...) sociability. Although Nussbaum puts forward self-validating arguments to prove that we cannot – on pain of pragmatic in consistency – dispute that practical rationality and sociability are necessary features of human life, it is my claim that her account is flawed. The nature of the relationship between ethics and human nature is the broader context to such debates. This paper raises questions regarding on the one hand, whether it is possible to found ethics in human nature and, on the other, what we are to make of accounts that turn on the assumption that identity is ethical, not meta physical. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(2) 2005: 87-96. (shrink)

The idea that people’s numerical identity may sometimes be discontinuous over time initially appears to provide useful material for defending restrictions on putatively self-harming behaviour in a non-paternalistic manner. According to this line of thinking, sometimes a putatively self-harming act is, in fact, a matter of ‘harm to others’. Yet, in this paper I argue that if we, as we ought to do, take into consideration the non-identity problem, this challenges the notion that the agent at T1 is (...) in fact imposing harm on anyone, even when we accept that he or she is numerically different from the agent at T2. If the life of the agent at T2 is still worth living, the agent is not worse off than he or she would have been in spite of the consequences pertaining to the putatively self-harming act since he or she would otherwise never have come into existence. In this way, the argument I put forward in this paper calls in question the ability of the shifting identity argument to actually justify imposing restrictions on self-harming behaviour. (shrink)

In this paper I outline and defend a new approach to personal-identity—personal-identity non-cognitivism—and argue that it has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals. On this view utterances of personal-identity sentences express a non-cognitive attitude towards relevant person-stages. The resulting view offers a pleasingly nuanced picture of what we are doing when we utter such sentences.

Personal identity is not always symmetric: even if I will not be a later person, the later person may have been me. What makes this possible is that the relations that are criterial of personal identity---such as memory and anticipation---are asymmetric and "count in favor of personal identity from one side only". Asymmetric personal identity can be accommodated by temporal counterpart theory but not by Lewisian overlapping aggregates of person stages. The (...) question of uncertainty in cases of personal fission (and in Everettian quantum mechanics) is also discussed. (shrink)

In his work on personal identity, Derek Parfit makes two revolutionary claims: firstly, that personal identity is not what matters in survival; and secondly, that what does matter is relation R. In this article I demonstrate his position here to be inconsistent, with the former claim being defensible only in case the latter is false. Parfit intends his famous fission argument to establish the unimportance of identity – a conclusion disputed by, among (...) others, Mark Johnston. My approach is to critically assess their debate, focusing on Johnston's reductio of Parfit's position. I contend that although Parfit's own response fails, there are other ways to save the fission argument. The unimportance of identity then comes at a cost, however, because the reductio can only be avoided by accepting either that nothing matters in survival, or else that facts about particles and forces do. Either way, relation R cannot be what matters. (shrink)