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 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 Personal Identity Existence and What Matters written by James Alexander Gromak and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It will be useful to begin with an extensive introduction to personhood in general. Like many other terms, philosophers oftentimes use the word 'person' differently from the colloquial use of the word. This colloquial use is usually meant to be singular for 'people', or to mean 'a human being'. Although philosophers do use the word in these ways, they also use it in yet another way. Our first question, then, I will call The Personhood Question: "What is it to be a person?" That is, what makes persons different from non-persons? What do persons have that non-persons do not have? Are human beings the only candidates for persons or are there (or could there be) nonhuman persons? Many philosophers throughout history have discussed these questions and suggested answers to them. A common trend from the Early Modern Period of Western philosophy (specifically Descartes and Locke) was to favor the mental aspect as essential to personhood. For Descartes, you are your mind. That is, you are an immaterial substance that thinks. The Cartesian view of personhood is thus associated with the person's soul. Locke similarly described a person as, "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places."1 According to him, you are a conscious being that persists by means of continued consciousness and memory. For both Descartes and Locke, a person is a conscious agent capable of interacting with and experiencing the world and generating plans or desires upon which to act.
Download or read book Reasons and Persons written by Derek Parfit and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1986-01-23 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.
Download or read book John Locke and Personal Identity written by K. Joanna S. Forstrom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most influential debates in John Locke's work is the problem of personal identity over time. This problem is that of how a person at one time is the same person later in time, and so can be held responsible for past actions. The time of most concern for Locke is that of the general resurrection promised in the New Testament. Given the turbulence of the Reformation and the formation of new approaches to the Bible, many philosophers and scientists paid careful attention to emerging orthodoxies or heterodoxies about death. Here K. Joanna S. Forstrom examines the interrelated positions of Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More and Robert Boyle in their individual contexts and in Locke's treatment of them. She argues that, in this way, we can better understand Locke and his position on personal identity and immortality. Once his unique take is understood and grounded in his own theological convictions (or lack thereof), we can better evaluate Locke and defend him against classic objections to his thought.
Download or read book The Essence of the Self written by Geoffrey Madell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes (a) that there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’; (b), that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and (c), that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine. Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell’s view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind.
Download or read book What Matters in Survival written by Douglas Ehring and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Locke on Personal Identity written by Galen Strawson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Locke's theory of personal identity underlies all modern discussion of the nature of persons and selves—yet it is widely thought to be wrong. In this book, Galen Strawson argues that in fact it is Locke’s critics who are wrong, and that the famous objections to his theory are invalid. Indeed, far from refuting Locke, they illustrate his fundamental point. Strawson argues that the root error is to take Locke’s use of the word "person" as merely a term for a standard persisting thing, like "human being." In actuality, Locke uses "person" primarily as a forensic or legal term geared specifically to questions about praise and blame, punishment and reward. This point is familiar to some philosophers, but its full consequences have not been worked out, partly because of a further error about what Locke means by the word "conscious." When Locke claims that your personal identity is a matter of the actions that you are conscious of, he means the actions that you experience as your own in some fundamental and immediate manner. Clearly and vigorously argued, this is an important contribution both to the history of philosophy and to the contemporary philosophy of personal identity.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self written by Raymond Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.
Download or read book Personal Identity and Self Consciousness written by Brian Garrett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-31 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Identity written by Florian Coulmas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces identity, one of the most iconic concepts of our time, which is used ubiquitously but rarely explained. It discusses the various uses of 'identity' separately for different fields of study - philosophy, psychology, sociology, gender studies, and linguistics. This book also compares Western concepts and theories of identity with similar concepts in other parts of the world. It explains how contemporary trends in marketization and globalization have made identity increasingly important to us in the last 50 years. This book also outlines the historical background to the concept of identity.
Download or read book The Self and Self Knowledge written by Annalisa Coliva and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of leading experts investigate a range of philosophical issues to do with the self and self-knowledge. Self and Self-Knowledge focuses on two main problems: how to account for I-thoughts and the consequences that doing so would have for our notion of the self; and how to explain subjects' ability to know the kind of psychological states they enjoy, which characteristically issues in psychological self-ascriptions. The first section of the volume consists of essays that, by appealing to different considerations which range from the normative to the phenomenological, offer an assessment of the animalist conception of the self. The second section presents an examination as well as a defence of the new epistemic paradigm, largely associated with recent work by Christopher Peacocke, according to which knowledge of our own mental states and actions should be based on an awareness of them and of our attempts to bring them about. The last section explores a range of different perspectives—from neo-expressivism to constitutivism—in order to assess the view that self-knowledge is more robust than any other form of knowledge. While the contributors differ in their specific philosophical positions, they all share the view that careful philosophical analysis is needed before scientific research can be fruitfully brought to bear on the issues at hand. These thought-provoking essays provide such an analysis and greatly deepen our understanding of these central aspects of our mentality.
Download or read book Subjectivity and Being Somebody written by Grant Gillett and published by St. Andrews Studies in Philoso. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the varieties of reductionism that affect philosophical writing about human origins and identity. Gillett goes on to discuss the effects of neurological interventions, such as psychosurgery, on the image of the human.
Download or read book Personal Identity in Moral and Legal Reasoning written by Richard Prust and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many questions about moral and legal judgments hinge on how we understand the identity of the agents. The intractability of many of these questions stems, this book argues, from ignoring how we actually connect actions with agents. When making everyday judgments about the morality or legality of actions, we do not use Aristotelian logic but what is termed “character logic”. The difference is crucial because implicit in character logic is an understanding of personal identity that is both coherent and intuitively familiar. A person, as we conceptualize him in moral and legal contexts, is a character of resolve. By unpacking what it means to be a character of resolve, this book reveals what underwrites our most fundamental beliefs about a person’s rights and responsibilities. It also provides a new and useful perspective on a variety of issues about rights and responsibilities that perennially occupy philosophers. This book discusses the following: • How we can make better sense of “human rights” if we think of them as “personal rights”. • How the right to be civilly disobedient, in contrast with ordinary law-breaking, can be justified as a personal right. • What basis we have for holding that someone’s responsibility is diminished. • How it makes sense to hold someone responsible for acting irresponsibly. • How it makes sense to distinguish a juvenile offender from someone who should be tried in criminal court. • What kind of correction we should expect from our correctional institutions and how we should design them to achieve that. By making explicit the axioms of character logic and exploring their origins and justification, the book provides a conceptually powerful tool for interpreting the protocols of a person-respecting society.
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.
