Exploring Personal Identity and Philosophical Questions
Delve into the intriguing realm of personal identity through philosophical inquiries like "Who am I?", "What is personhood?", and "How does personal identity persist over time?" Uncover the essence of identity, narratives, and attachment that define us as individuals. Reflect on the complexities of what it means to be a person and the significance of continuity in personal existence.
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Presentation Transcript
Personal Identity An Introduction
Philosophical Questions arising from being a person 1. Who am I? Characterization Question (narrative identity) 2. Personhood? What is it to be a person as opposed to a non- person? 3. Persistence? Personal Identity Over Time (numerical identity) 4. How do we find out who is who? Evidence 5. What am I? 6. What matter to identity/What does identity matter to? Why does it matter?
Who am I? Characterization question (Narrative Identity) Marya Schechtman Properties To which we feel a special sense of attachment/ownership That define an individual as a person That make an individual the person they are That distinguish a person from others Connected to identity, even if the person does not have them in reality Personal identity , as opposed to: Ethnic identity National identity Personal identity as Contingent & Temporary
Personhood What is it to be a person as opposed to a non-person? When does a fertilized egg become a person? Can a chimpanzee, an alien, or a computer become a person? Attempt at defining personhood: Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only it x t Baker: a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties Chisholm: direct connection between personhood and mental properties & a person is capable of acquiring those properties Wiggins: direct connection between personhood and mental properties & a person belongs to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy & mature
Persistence Personal Identity Over Time (numerical) What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another; to continue rather than to cease to exist? What experiences is it possible to survive? What sorts of events would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? What is it about a picture of you from when you were a child that relates to you now in a way that we can say that the child is you? What makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? How might your reincarnation relate to you now?
Finding out who is who What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? 1st-Person memory (psychological continuity) Spatio-temporal continuity (physical continuity) Which of these two is more fundamental? This question dominates 1950-1970s Anglophone literature Shoemaker 1963, 1970 Penelhum 1967, 1970 Separate from the persistence question: What it takes for you to persist through time is one thing; how we ought to evaluate the relevant evidence is another ~ Eric Olson
What am I? Metaphysically speaking, what sort of things are you and I, and other human people? What are the fundamental properties that make us people? What are we made of? All matter? Or is there an immaterial part? Where are our spatial boundaries? What fixes those boundaries? Are we even spatially extended?
What am I?: Traditional Answers Biological organisms ( animalism ) Material things constituted by organization different from a certain animal because what it takes for us to persist is different from the animal Temporal parts of animals - Maybe brains Temporal parts of brains Partless immaterial substances (i.e. Souls ) Compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a material body Collections of mental states or events ( bundles of perceptions ) There is nothing that we are we don t really exist at all
