Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T17:19:10.686Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Personal Identity and the Idea of a Human Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Geoffrey Madell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. By contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 127 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Yet Noonan, Harold, defending a psychological continuity view in his recent Personal Identity (London: Routledge, 1989), doesn't even mention it; nor is there any discussion of the opposition between first and third person viewpoints.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Perry, J., ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Nous 13 (1979), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Evans, G., The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 255–6.Google Scholar

4 What follows is an attempt to bring up to date the discussions in my The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, ch. 2 and my Mind and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), ch. 5.Google Scholar

5 Lycan, G., Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books, 1987), ch. 7.Google Scholar

6 Mellor, H., ‘I and Now’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 89 (1988–1989), 70–94.Google Scholar

7 Husserl, E., Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1970), 315–6.Google Scholar

8 Perry, , ‘Essential Indexical’Google Scholar; Shoemaker, S. and Swinburne, R., Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 104.Google Scholar

9 Johnston, M., ‘Human Beings’, Journal of Philosophy 84, No. 2 (02 1987) 59–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Wilkes, K., Real People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), ch. 1.Google Scholar

11 Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 199–201.Google Scholar

12 McGinn, C., ‘Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?’, Mind 98, No. 391 (07 1989), 349–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar