There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: in contrast to prior work, (...) most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4), and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (shrink)

What happens to us when we die? According to Christian faith, we will rise again bodily from the dead. This claim raises a series of philosophical and theological conundrums: Is it rational to hope for life after death in bodily form? Will it truly be “we” who are raised again or will it be post-mortem duplicates of us? How can personal identity be secured? What is God's role in resurrection and everlasting life? In response to these conundrums, this volume (...) presents joint work of leading philosophers and theologians on life after death. So this volume is an impressive demonstration of interdisciplinary cooperation between philosophy and theology. Various models are offered which depict what resurrection into an incorruptible post-mortem body might look like. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that this person at this time is 'the same' as that person at an earlier time? If the brain is damaged or the memory lost, how far does a person's identity continue? In this book two eminent philosophers develop very different approaches to the problem.

Personal Identity and Ethics provides a lively overview of the relationship between the metaphysics of personal identity and ethics. How does personal identity affect our ethical judgments? It is a commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some relevant respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of (...) moral theory commit us to holding that persons do remain identical over time? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? -/- Shoemaker provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues for the undergraduate audience. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity's significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, populations ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death. (shrink)

Objections to uploading may be parsed into substrate issues, dealing with the computer platform of upload and personal identity. This paper argues that the personal identity issues of uploading are no more or less challenging than those of bodily transfer often discussed in the philosophical literature. It is argued that what is important in personal identity involves both token and type identity. While uploading does not preserve token identity, it does save type identity; and even qua token, (...) one may have good reason to think that the preservation of the type is worth the cost. (shrink)

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. (...) By contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind. (shrink)

This paper explores the impacts of neurological intervention on selfhood with reference to recipients’ claims about changes to their self-understanding following Deep Brain Stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. In the neuroethics literature, patients’ claims such as: “I don’t feel like myself anymore” and “I feel like a machine”, are often understood as expressing threats to identity. In this paper I argue that framing debates in terms of a possible threat to identity—whether for or against the proposition, is mistaken and (...) occludes what is ethically salient in changes from DBS. Rather, by adopting a relational narrative approach to identity and autonomy, I show that the ethically salient issue from DBS is impacts on autonomous agency—whether one’s actions and beliefs are one’s own, and how DBS may hinder, or foster, embodied, relational autonomy competences. This approach recognizes that if sufficiently significant, impacts on autonomy competences may pose a threat to one’s ability to contribute to the process of authoring one’s own life and so pose a threat to identity formation. I argue this approach resolves the confusion in the literature about whether and how DBS threatens identity and provides a complex picture of how DBS may affect selfhood by disrupting narrative identity formation and revision, distorting agency and/or undermining autonomy. (shrink)

Given that all Buddhists give universal scope to the no-self view, accounts of personal identity in Buddhism cannot rest on egological conceptions of self-consciousness. Without a conception of consciousness as the property, function, or dimension of an enduring subject or self, how, then, do mental states acquire their first-personal character? What it is that in virtue of which mental states exhibit a basic or minimal sense of self? These questions are at the heart of a long debate about (...) the nature and character of consciousness and self-consciousness. This paper traces the genealogy of key concepts of consciousness and personal identity in Buddhism, their role in articulating specific accounts of self-knowledge, and their relevance to contemporary debates in phenomenology and philosophy of mind about the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness. (shrink)

We take it for granted that a person persists over time: when we make plans, we assume that we will carry them out; when we punish someone for a crime, we assume that she is the same person as the one who committed it. Metaphysical questions underlying these assumptions point towards an area of deep existential and philosophical interest. In this volume, leading metaphysicians discuss key questions about personal identity, including 'What are we?', 'How do we persist?', and 'Which (...) conditions guarantee our identity over time?' They discuss whether personal identity is 'complex', whereby it is analyzable in terms of simpler relations such as physical or psychological features, or whether it is 'simple', namely something that cannot be analyzed in terms of more fundamental relations. Their essays offer an innovative discussion of this topic and will be of interest to a wide readership in metaphysics. (shrink)

The main contribution of this work is to develop the account of material constitution presented in Spatially Coinciding Objects (Ratio 24, 1982) and a series of related articles. This account was merely ‘analytical’ in that it applied generously to ‘putative’ examples of distinct entities (individuals, pluralities and masses of stuff) in the same place at the same time. The account herein is ‘critical’ in that it seeks justification for recognizing the existence of entities constituted in addition to the entities that (...) allegedly constitute them. While the earlier account used examples such as a clay statue and the clay of the statue for purposes of illustrating material constitution, the present account would consider ‘reducing’ the statue to the clay, and seeks justification for how to resist this and admit the existence of generable and perishable natural objects in general. The justification sought is ‘deep’ in the sense that (unlike the popular ‘method of cases) it does not belong to ‘descriptive’ metaphysics (in Strawson’s sense) but is sufficiently potent to counter ‘revisionist’ views. Transcendental arguments, beginning with austere assumptions of justification itself, are thereby employed. Suggestions are made about what to conclude about our own identity, which amount to supporting animalism. (shrink)

This volume collects a number of Perry's classic works on personal identity as well as four new pieces, 'The Two Faces of Identity', 'Persons and Information', 'Self-Notions and The Self' and 'The Sense of Identity'. Perry's Introduction puts his own work and that of others on the issues of identity and personal identity in the context of philosophical studies of mind and language over the past thirty years.

The paper presents considerations that weigh against one or another version of the psychological continuity theory of personal identity over time. Such Locke-like theories frequently go wrong, it is argued, in not formulating precisely how the psychological states of an individual person are related diachronically, in failing to capture a truly appropriate causal connection between later and earlier psychological states, and in claiming support from particular cases. In addition, the paper offers examples and other considerations that support an alternative, (...) biological continuity theory according to which you and I are each identical with a human organism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. We here present the first reliable translation directly from the Classical Chinese, and discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. We emphasise the (...) philosophical importance of embedding the story in two framing narratives, and demonstrate that the story taps a range of intuitions, and indeed fears, about the survival of the self which have also played a large role in the history of the topic in the West, and which continue to be of great contemporary concern. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on (...) personal identity. (shrink)

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)

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

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)

In contemporary western philosophy, there are two major positions on the issue of personal identity, the one upholding the substantive notion of an enduring ego, the other rejecting the idea of an enduring subject completely. While the substantive position seems to be untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind, the rejection of an enduring agency has left unanswered the questions of subjective agency, ethical responsibility and accountability. In contrast to these approaches, Buddhism has long (...) upheld a conception which, while rejecting the problematic notion of an enduring person or self, does not dispense with the notion of subjective agency. My dissertation will formulate such a non-substantive notion of personhood based on the Buddhist theory of self-cultivation. ;My dissertation commences with a critique of the present theories of personal identity and the assumptions underlying the very notion of personal identity. In the light of this criticism, the notion of "Mensch-sein" seems to be more appropriate than the notion of "personal identity." With this as a basis, the dissertation offers a new conception of Mensch-sein, drawing on Dogen's theory of self-cultivation and Jung's notion of individuation. It will especially investigate the phenomena of selfhood, alterity, and continuity. It is my belief that such an understanding of Mensch-sein not only contributes to a comparative philosophy of personhood and of the mind but also provides a conceptual tool to understand latest developments in cognitive science and psychology. Thus, it illustrates that the study of religion contributes to the systematized understanding of the world. (shrink)

The personal identity relation is of great interest to philosophers, who often consider fictional scenarios to test what features seem to make persons persist through time. But often real examples of neuroscientific interest also provide important tests of personal identity. One such example is the case of Phineas Gage – or at least the story often told about Phineas Gage. Many cite Gage’s story as example of severed personal identity; Phineas underwent such a tremendous change that Gage (...) “survived as a different man.” I discuss a recent empirical finding about judgments about this hypothetical. It is not just the magnitude of the change that affects identity judgment; it is also the negative direction of the change. I present an experiment suggesting that direction of change also affects neuroethical judgments. I conclude we should consider carefully the way in which improvements and deteriorations affect attributions of personal identity. This is particularly important since a number of the most crucial neuroethical decisions involve varieties of cognitive enhancements or deteriorations. (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)

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)

The view that it is possible for someone to think at a time without existing at that time is not only perfectly coherent but in harmony with an attractive externalist view of the mental. Furthermore, it offers plausible solutions to various puzzles of personal identity.

Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on personal identity in Eastern philosophy, which I (...) am not competent to discuss. Collins 1982 is a good source.). (shrink)

In this essay, I will investigate the implications of human enhancement for personal identity and assess likely social and ethical consequences of these changes. Human enhancement, also called human augmentation, is an emerging field within medicine and bioengineering that aims to develop technologies and techniques for overcoming current limitations of human cognitive and physical abilities (Naam, 2004; Wilsdon and Miller, 2006; Garreau, 2005; Parens, 1998; Agar, 2004). Technologies developed in this field are called human enhancement technologies (HETs). HETs rely (...) on advances in genetic engineering, pharmacology, bioengineering, cybernetics and nanotechnology. In these fields, it is becoming possible to develop techniques that improve human functions beyond a normal range. The envisioned applications are limitless, and include the enhancement of human traits like muscular strength, endurance, vision, intelligence, mood and personality. (shrink)

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)

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.

This book examines the conception of the person at work in John Rawls's writings from Theory of Justice to Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. The book aims to show that objections to Rawls's political conception of the person fail and that a Rawlsian conception of political identity is defensible. The book shows that the debate between liberals and communitarians is relevant to the current debate regarding perfectionism and neutrality in politics, and clarifies the debate between Rawls and communitarians in a (...) way that will promote fruitful discussion on the issue of political identity. It does this by providing a clearer account of a conception of personal identity according to which persons are socially constituted, including the intuitions and assumptions underlying the communitarians' conception of persons as "socially constituted." It examines the communitarian objections to liberal political theory and to the liberal conception of persons, the "unencumbered self." The book differentiates between two types of objection to the liberal conception of persons: the metaphysical and normative. It explains Rawls's political conception of persons, and the metaphysical and normative commitments Rawls incurs-and does not incur-in virtue of that conception. It shows that both kind of objection to Rawls's political conception of the person fail. Finally, modifying Rawls's political conception of the person, a Rawlsian conception of political identity is explained and defended. (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)

The traditional philosophical problems surrounding the issue of personal identity arise from trying to answer the following series of questions in a systematic way1. Given a person X, we want to know: (1) With which past and future entities is X (numerically) identical? (2) Which facts determine the answer to (1)?

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)

What is the self? And how does it relate to the body? In the second edition of Personal Identity, Harold Noonan presents the major historical theories of personal identity, particularly those of Locke, Leibniz, Butler, Reid and Hume. Noonan goes on to give a careful analysis of what the problem of personal identity is, and its place in the context of more general puzzles about identity. He then moves on to consider the main issues and arguments which (...) are the subject of current debate, including the work of Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit, and makes new and challenging interpretations of them. This new edition contains additional material assessing the biological approach which has become increasingly popular in recent years, and extends the treatment of indeterminate identity to take account of the epistemic view of vagueness. This book covers the problem of personal identity from its origin in Locke's work to the most recent debates in the philosophical literature, and will be invaluablereading for any student of the topic. (shrink)

Kevin Tobia on how our intuitions about personal identity reflect moral norms.

There are two main views about the nature of personal identity. I shall briehy describe these views, say without argument which I believe to be true, and then discuss the implications of this view for one of the main conceptions of rationality. This conception I shall call "C1assical Prudence." I shall argue that, on what I believe to be the true view about personal identity, Classical Prudence is indefensible.

Contents PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 John Perry: The Problem of Personal Identity, 3 PART II: VERSIONS OF THE MEMORY THEORY 2 John Locke: Of Identity and ...

Going beyond the present controversy surrounding personhood in various non-philosophical contexts, this book seeks to defend the renewed philosophical interest in issues connected with this topic and the need for a more credible philosophical conception of the person. Taking the theory of John Locke as a starting point and in dialogue with contemporary philosophers such as Derek Parfit and P.F. Strawson, the authors develop an original philosophical anthropology based on the writings of Charles Hartshorne and A.N. Whitehead. The authors then (...) show the implications for ethics of this conception of the person and the self. (shrink)

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This (...) result undermines some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of strong conventionalism minus the ontological commitments of that view. It defends the claim that strictly speaking there are no persons, whilst explicating how to make sense of talk that is about (or purportedly about) persons, by appealing to features in common to conventionalist accounts of personal identity. This view has the many benefits of conventionalist accounts in being flexible enough to deal with problem cases, whilst also avoiding the various worries associated with the (...) existence of both persons and human animals occupying the same place at the same time to which conventionalist accounts are committed. (shrink)

Accent modification is arguably a common practice in Britain, given the often negative class-based assumptions regarding regional accents in particular. Rather than assume that accent modification is a neutral practice, however, the current study asks how accent modification can potentially impact on people’s identity. In other words, how does a consciously modified accent affect how people see themselves? To answer this, 92 British participants were involved in the study, providing questionnaire responses. The results show that while most remain neutral toward (...) the practice, over a third regards accent modification as ‘selling out’. This demonstrates how accent-based prejudice in society can be the motivating factor to modify one’s accent and, as many celebrate their natural accent, accommodation can lead to individuals feeling like frauds, suggesting that pride in one’s accent can mean for some, that, in keeping with essentialist philosophy, accent, and subsequent identity, is not to be tampered with. (shrink)