Download or read book Organisms and Personal Identity written by A.M. Ferner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over his philosophical career, David Wiggins has produced a body of work that, though varied and wide-ranging, stands as a coherent and carefully integrated whole. In this book Ferner examines Wiggins’ conceptualist-realism, his sortal theory ‘D’ and his human being theory in order to assess how far these elements of his systematic metaphysics connect. In addition to rectifying misinterpretations and analysing the relations between Wiggins’ works, Ferner reveals the importance of the philosophy of biology to Wiggins’ approach. This book elucidates the biological anti-reductionism present in Wiggins’ work and highlights how this stance stands as a productive alternative to emergentism. With an analysis of Wiggins’ construal of substances, specifically organisms, the book goes on to discuss how Wiggins brings together the concept of a person with the concept of a natural substance, or human being. An extensive introduction to the work of David Wiggins, as well as a contribution to the dialogue between personal identity theorists and philosophers of biology, this book will appeal to students and scholars working in the areas of philosophy, biology and the history of Anglophone metaphysics.
Download or read book Organisms and Personal Identity written by A.M. Ferner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over his philosophical career, David Wiggins has produced a body of work that, though varied and wide-ranging, stands as a coherent and carefully integrated whole. In this book Ferner examines Wiggins’ conceptualist-realism, his sortal theory ‘D’ and his human being theory in order to assess how far these elements of his systematic metaphysics connect. In addition to rectifying misinterpretations and analysing the relations between Wiggins’ works, Ferner reveals the importance of the philosophy of biology to Wiggins’ approach. This book elucidates the biological anti-reductionism present in Wiggins’ work and highlights how this stance stands as a productive alternative to emergentism. With an analysis of Wiggins’ construal of substances, specifically organisms, the book goes on to discuss how Wiggins brings together the concept of a person with the concept of a natural substance, or human being. An extensive introduction to the work of David Wiggins, as well as a contribution to the dialogue between personal identity theorists and philosophers of biology, this book will appeal to students and scholars working in the areas of philosophy, biology and the history of Anglophone metaphysics.
Download or read book Animalism written by Stephan Blatti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are we? What is the nature of the human person? Animalism has a straightforward answer to these long-standing philosophical questions: we are animals. Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring this increasingly popular view, some defending animalism, others criticizing it, and others exploring its more philosophical implications.
Download or read book The Human Animal written by Eric T. Olson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Rejecting several famous thought experiments dealing with personal identity, he instead argues that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive.
Download or read book The Limits of the Self written by Thomas Pradeu and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immunology asserts that an individual can be defined through self and nonself. Thomas Pradeu argues that this theory is inadequate, because immune responses to self constituents and immune tolerance of foreign entities are the rule, not the exception.
Download or read book Personal Identity and Ethics written by David Shoemaker and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some 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 the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? Personal Identity and Ethics provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. 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, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.
Download or read book Staying Alive written by Marya Schechtman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
Download or read book Personal Identity written by Harold W. Noonan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction to the nature of the self and its relation to the body, this title places the problem of personal identity in the context of more general puzzles about identity, and discusses the major related theories.
Download or read book Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality written by Logi Gunnarsson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As witnessed by recent films such as Fight Club and Identity, our culture is obsessed with multiple personality—a phenomenon raising intriguing questions about personal identity. This study offers both a full-fledged philosophical theory of personal identity and a systematic account of multiple personality. Gunnarsson combines the methods of analytic philosophy with close hermeneutic and phenomenological readings of cases from different fields, focusing on psychiatric and psychological treatises, self-help books, biographies, and fiction. He develops an original account of personal identity (the authorial correlate theory) and offers a provocative interpretation of multiple personality: in brief, "multiples" are right about the metaphysics but wrong about the facts.
Download or read book Personal Identity written by Georg Gasser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses whether personal identity is analyzable, with innovative discussion of 'complex' and 'simple' theories.
Download or read book Biological Identity written by Anne Sophie Meincke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists.
Download or read book Doctor Who and Philosophy written by Courtland Lewis and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers look at the deeper issues raised by the adventures of Doctor Who, the main character in the long-running science fiction TV series of the same name.
Download or read book Persons Animals Ourselves written by Paul F. Snowdon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The starting point for this book is a particular answer to a question that grips many of us: what kind of thing are we? The particular answer is that we are animals (of a certain sort)—a view nowadays called 'animalism'. This answer will appear obvious to many but on the whole philosophers have rejected it. Paul F. Snowdon proposes, contrary to that attitude, that there are strong reasons to believe animalism and that when properly analysed the objections against it that philosophers have given are not convincing. One way to put the idea is that we should not think of ourselves as things that need psychological states or capacities to exist, any more that other animals do. The initial chapters analyse the content and general philosophical implications of animalism—including the so-called problem of personal identity, and that of the unity of consciousness—and they provide a framework which categorises the standard philosophical objections. Snowdon then argues that animalism is consistent with a perfectly plausible account of the central notion of a 'person', and he criticises the accounts offered by John Locke and by David Wiggins of that notion. In the two next chapters Snowdon argues that there are very strong reasons to think animalism is true, and proposes some central claims about animal which are relevant to the argument. In the rest of the book the task is to formulate and to persuade the reader of the lack of cogency of the standard philosophical objections, including the conviction that it is possible for the animal that I would be if animalism were true to continue in existence after I have ceased to exist, and the argument that it is possible for us to remain in existence even when the animal has ceased to exist. In considering these types of objections the views of various philosophers, including Nagel, Shoemaker, Johnston, Wilkes, and Olson, are also explored. Snowdon concludes that animalism represents a highly commonsensical and defensible way of thinking about ourselves, and that its rejection by philosophers rests on the tendency when doing philosophy to mistake fantasy for reality.
Download or read book Science Fiction and Philosophy written by Susan Schneider and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring numerous updates and enhancements, Science Fiction and Philosophy, 2nd Edition, presents a collection of readings that utilize concepts developed from science fiction to explore a variety of classic and contemporary philosophical issues. Uses science fiction to address a series of classic and contemporary philosophical issues, including many raised by recent scientific developments Explores questions relating to transhumanism, brain enhancement, time travel, the nature of the self, and the ethics of artificial intelligence Features numerous updates to the popular and highly acclaimed first edition, including new chapters addressing the cutting-edge topic of the technological singularity Draws on a broad range of science fiction’s more familiar novels, films, and TV series, including I, Robot, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Brave New World Provides a gateway into classic philosophical puzzles and topics informed by the latest technology
Download or read book Handbook of Self and Identity written by Mark R. Leary and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded as the authoritative reference in the field, this volume comprehensively reviews theory and research on the self. Leading investigators address this essential construct at multiple levels of analysis, from neural pathways to complex social and cultural dynamics. Coverage includes how individuals gain self-awareness, agency, and a sense of identity; self-related motivation and emotion; the role of the self in interpersonal behavior; and self-development across evolutionary time and the lifespan. Connections between self-processes and psychological problems are also addressed. New to This Edition *Incorporates significant theoretical and empirical advances. *Nine entirely new chapters. *Coverage of the social and cognitive neuroscience of self-processes; self-regulation and health; self and emotion; and hypoegoic states, such as mindfulness.
Download or read book The Constitution of Selves written by Marya Schechtman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An amnesia victim asking "Who am I?" means something different from a confused adolescent asking the same question. Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second. The problem of personal identity, she suggests, is usually understood to be a question about historical life. What she calls the "reidentification question" is taken to be the real metaphysical question of personal identity, whereas questions about beliefs or values and the actions they prompt, the "characterization question," are often presented as merely metaphorical. Failure to recognize the philosophical importance of both these questions, Schechtman argues, has undermined analytic philosophy's attempts at offering a satisfying account of personal identity. Considerations related to the characterization question creep unrecognized into discussions of reidentification, with the result that neither question is adequately addressed. Schechtman shows how separating the two questions allows for a more fruitful approach to the reidentification question, and she develops her own narrative account of characterization. She suggests that persons constitute their identities by developing autobiographical narratives that bear the right relation to facts about the environment, the general concept of a person, and other people's concepts of who they are.
Download or read book Holding and Letting Go written by Hilde Lindemann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the social practice of holding each other in our identities, beginning with pregnancy and on through the life span. Lindemann argues that our identities give us our sense of how to act and how to treat others, and that the ways in which we we hold each other in them is of crucial moral importance.
