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Personal Identity and the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

P.T. Mackenzie
P.T. Mackenzie
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan
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Extract

Philosophers are inclined to raise philosophical dust by asking such questions as, what relations must exist between two body occurrences for them to be body occurrences of the same body? or what relation among person-stages makes them stages of the same person? and then complain that they cannot see the answers. I want to argue that the reason they cannot see the answers is that these questions and others like them are misconceived.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 224 , April 1983 , pp. 161 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford University Press, 1976), 141.

2 Patricia Kitcher, ‘The Crucial Relation in Personal Identity’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (March 1978), 132.

3 W. Quine, Methods of Logic, 3rd edn (New York: Holt, Reinhart Winston, ), 222.

4 According to Leibniz in a letter to Arnauld, ‘I hold that where there are only entities by aggregation there will not be any real entities. For it only takes its reality from the reality of those of which it is composed, so it will not have any at all, if each entity of which it is composed is itself an entity by aggregation …’ (Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, C. R. Morris (ed.) (Everyman's Library, 1934, 78)).

5 Locke answered that it was continued existence (Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, II, xxvii, 3) but he forgot to laugh.

6 Butler's Analogy &Sermons, J. Angus (ed.) (London: The Religious Tract Society), 315.

7 Except in the sense that one could say that it was partly the same.

8 See R. G. Swinburne, ‘Personal Identity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1973–1974), 231-247, for an excellent presentation of this point.

9 See R. Chisholm ‘Loose, Popular, Strict, Philosophical Senses of Identity’, Perception and Personal Identity, N. S. Case and R. H. Grim (eds) (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 102-104.

10 See S. Shoemaker, ‘Persons and Their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly (1970), 271.

11 J. Locke, Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter xxvii, Section 14.

12 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (MIT Press edition, 1969), 357.

13 Unless, of course someone else had the experience and that experience was transferred to me by some electronic wizardry.

14 I owe this example to J. L. Mackie (op. cit., 191-192).

15 R. W. Sperry, Brain and Conscious Experience, J. C. Eccles (ed.) (New York: Springer Verlag, 1966), 299.

16 See D. Wiggins, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 52-53.

17 Personal Identity’, Philosophical Review (January 1971), 3-27.