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Can I Cease to be a Person?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Nollaig Mackenzie
Nollaig Mackenzie
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

Patricia Kitcher has argued that there is an anomaly in our thought about ourselves. Her thesis turns on a claim concerning our attitude toward an imagined case, and on an argument that the attitude is irrational.

The example, E, is as follows. Suppose you are told today that tomorrow you will lose those capacities, whatever they may be, in virtue of which you are a person. After this happens, the body which is now yours will be tortured. Pain will be felt.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 239 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1982

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References

2 “Being Selfish about your Future”, Philosophical Studies 32 (1977), 425–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Wiggins, David, Identity and Spatio Temporal Continuity (Oxford, 1967).Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 30.

5 Ibid., 69.

6 By “F and G are independent” I mean that neither F nor G is a restriction of the other, and that there is no third sortal of which each is a restriction.

7 I take this over (more or less) from Wiggins (46ff.). He discusses Aristotle's use of the term “psuche”, “soul”, and argues that it comes out tantamount to our use of the term “person”, so that one should say, not that Callias has a soul, but that he is one. I appropriate the term to designate a set broader than “person” does.

8 Ibid., 75.

9 Much more complicated. My version runs over fifty lines, has nested loops, and is recursive.