In the paper, after clarifying terms such as ‘identity’, ‘self’ and ‘personhood’, I propose an empirical account of identity based on the notion of “whole phenotype”. This move allows one to claim the persistence of the individuals before and after their being affected by dementia. Furthermore, I show how this account permits us to address significant questions related to demented individuals’ loss of the capacity of moral decisions.

Don Marquis argues that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of a valuable future. This paper argues that there is no morally relevant difference between the relations that foetuses stand in to valuable futures and those that gametes stand in to such futures. Therefore, Marquis’ account implies that contraception is prima facie seriously wrong. My argument for this conclusion has a significant advantage over existing criticisms of Marquis based on controversial accounts of personal identity. It (...) shows that the problem with his account is not his view that identity across time is a matter of merely biological relations, but his investment of those relations with moral significance. This criticism has force no matter which account of personal identity is true. (shrink)

Is a theory of identity necessary for bioethics? In this paper I investigate that question starting from an empirical explication of identity based on post-genomics, in particular on epigenetics. After analysing whether the classic problems a theory of identity has to cope with also affect the proposed epigenetic account of identity, I deal with three topics to offer an insight on the relationship between that account and bioethics.

A central metaphilosophical project seeks to evaluate the reliability of the types of evidence that figure in philosophical arguments and, relatedly, the justificatory status of relying on those types of evidence. Traditionally, metaphilosophers have approached this project via an analysis of intuition. This article argues that the category picked out by “intuition” is both too broad and too heterogeneous to serve as the appropriate target for metaphilosophical inquiry. Intuition is a gerrymandered and disjunctive kind, undeserving of the widespread attention it (...) receives in the literature. Instead, metaphilosophers should examine more finely grained mental states. Three promising strategies for parsing intuitions more finely are proposed: by their causal origins, by their context of employment, and by the exoticism of their content. This more narrow focus may significantly alter the dialectic in three prominent metaphilosophical arguments: the argument from calibration, the argument from self-defeat, and the argument from intuitional sensitivity. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the transformation from the human zygote to the implanted embryo under the prism of substantial change. After a brief introduction, it vindicates the Aristotelian ideas of substance and accident, and those of substantial and accidental change. It then claims that the transformation from the multicelled zygote to the implanted embryo amounts to a substantial change. Pushing further, it contends that this substantial change cannot be explained following patterns of genetic reductionism, emergence, and self-organization, and proposes Gustavo Bueno’s (...) idea of anamorphosis as a means to encapsulate criticism against such positions. (shrink)

This paper points out a tension between Agustín Rayo's criteria for singulartermhood and his explicit views on the status of Hybrid Identities, that is, identity statements that use singular terms from two different Systems of Representation, such as "7=Julius Caesar" or more suggestively "I am b" where "b" is a singular term referring to my brain. It argues that non-trivial Hybrid Identities are common and important in philosophy and elsewhere, and it suggests a friendly alternative that involves treating Hybrid Identities (...) on the model of Rayo's "Just Is" statements. The last section of the paper points out that even this friendly alternative has counterintuitive consequences when combined with the metaphysical conventionalism that Rayo finds attractive, when it comes to questions of personal identity over time. (shrink)

Don Marquis has argued most abortions are immoral, for the same reason that killing you or me is immoral: abortion deprives the fetus of a valuable future. Call this account the FLOA. A rival account is Jeff McMahan’s, time-relative interest account of the wrongness of killing. According to this account, an act of killing is wrong to the extent that it deprives the victim of future value and the relation of psychological unity would have held between the victim at the (...) time of death and herself at a later time if she had lived. The TRIA supposedly has two chief advantages over Marquis’s FLOA. First, unlike the FLOA, the TRIA does not rely on the controversial thesis that identity is what matters in survival. Second, the TRIA yields more plausible verdicts about cases. Proponents of the TRIA use the account to argue that abortion is generally permissible, because there would be little to no psychological unity between the fetus and later selves if it lived. I argue that advocates of the TRIA have failed to establish its superiority to the FLOA, for two reasons. First, the two views are on a par with respect to the thesis that identity is what matters in survival. Second, Marquis’s FLOA does not yield the counterintuitive implications about cases that advocates of the TRIA have attributed to it, and the TRIA yields its own share of implausible judgments about cases. (shrink)

This collection serves as an introduction to the concept of subjective fact, which plays a central role in some of the author's philosophical writings. The collection contains two book chapters and a paper. The first chapter (Chapter 2 of From Brain to Cosmos) begins with an informal characterization of the concept of subjective fact. Then it fleshes out this concept with examples, gives a more precise characterization, and addresses some potential weaknesses of the concept. This chapter shows how subjective fact (...) is related to key ideas in the philosophy of mind, such as intentionality. The second chapter (Chapter 3) is a detailed study of the concept of “instance of seeming” that was introduced in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 ends with some remarks on the modal logic of subjective facts. The paper, also by the book’s author, answers some potential questions about the ideas in the two included chapters. (shrink)

The central claim of the Parfitian psychological approach to personal identity is that the fact about personal identity is underpinned by a non-branching psychological continuity relation. Hence, for the advocates of the Parfitian view, it is important to understand what it is for a relation to take or not take a branching form. Nonetheless, very few attempts have been made in the literature of personal identity to define the non-branching clause. This paper undertakes this task. Drawing upon a recent debate (...) between Anthony Brueckner and Harold Noonan on the issue, I present three candidates for the non-branching clause. (shrink)

A plausible principle governing identity is that whether a later individual is identical with an earlier individual cannot ever merely depend on whether there are, at the later time, any better candidates for identity with the earlier individual around. This principle has been a bone of contention amongst philosophers interested in identity for many years. In his latest book Philosophical Explanations Robert Nozick presents what I believe to be the strongest case yet made out for the rejection of this principle. (...) My aim in this paper is to argue, with reference in particular to personal and artefact identity, that Nozick's case can be met and that a theory of identity which entails the correctness of this principle is the equal, indeed the superior, in explanatory power of the theory Nozick develops on the basis of its rejection. (shrink)

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first (...) step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena. (shrink)

It is argued here that it is part of our concept of a ‘person’ that persons should be, by its nature, able to endure in time. In no conception of persons as ‘perduring’ entities with different temporal parts for different times, or as sequences of stages in the relation of ‘being a survival of ’ between them, it is possible to make sense of some of our normative intuitions about persons. It is argued also that the traditional psychological theory of (...) personal identity is untenable. Psychological continuity appears to be neither sufficient nor necessary for personal identity. A reasonable conception of persons seems to be either a form of ‘animalism’ where persons are biological organisms, or a theory in which persons are primitive substances, with primitive conditions of identity. (shrink)

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which (...) may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena. (shrink)

To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on fore- thought;such agents must remember; and learn from; the past to predict the future. In complex; non-stationaryenvironments; such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. A significant part of anagent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled cumulative life experience; which the agent isdriven to constantly expand. The combination of the drive to novelty with practical limits on memorycapacity posits a problem. (...) On the one hand; because novelty seekers are unhappy when bored; merelyreliving past positive experiences soon loses its appeal: happiness can only be attained sporadically; via anopen-ended pursuit of new experience. On the other hand; because the experiencer’s memory is finite;longevity and continued novelty; taken together; imply eventual loss of at least some of the stored content;and with it a disruption of the constructed identity. In this essay; I examine the biobehavioral and cognitive-computational circumstances that give rise to this problem and explore its implications for the humancondition. (shrink)

Cumming (2008) uses a puzzle about belief ascription to argue against a Millian semantics, and in favor of a semantics on which names are assigned denotations relative to a shiftable variable assignment. I use Cumming's puzzle to showcase the virtues of a rival, broadly Stalnakerian, treatment of attitude ascriptions that safeguards Millianism. I begin by arguing that Cumming's solution seems unable to account for substitutivity data that helps constitute the very puzzle he uses to motivate his account. Once the substitutivity (...) data is acknowledged, the puzzle actually seems to strengthen, rather than weaken, the Millian position. I then argue that the real force of the puzzle is to place special constraints on our accounts of de re belief ascription. To help bring out the nature of those constraints, I connect aspects of Cumming's puzzle to more familiar problems about belief ascription raised by Quine. I then defend three theses making up a skeletal account of de re belief ascription that promises to cope naturally with the variants of Cumming's puzzle, and integrate them into a broader theory of de re intensionality. (shrink)

In philosophy, the criteria for personhood (PH) at a specific point in time (synchronic), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity (PI) over time (diachronic) are traditionally separated. Hence, the transition between both timescales of a person's life remains largely unclear. Personal habits reflect a decision-making (DM) process that binds together synchronic and diachronic timescales. Despite the fact that the actualization of habits takes place synchronically, they presuppose, for the possibility of their generation, time in a diachronic sense. (...) The acquisition of habits therefore rests upon PI over time; that is, the temporal extension of personal decisions is the necessary condition for the possible development of habits. Conceptually, habits can thus be seen as a bridge between synchronic and diachronic timescales of a person's life. In order to investigate the empirical mediation of this temporal linkage, we draw upon the neuronal mechanisms underlying DM; in particular on the distinction between internally and externally guided DM. Externally guided DM relies on external criteria at a specific point in time (synchronic); on a neural level, this has been associated with lateral frontal and parietal brain regions. In contrast, internally guided DM is based on the person's own preferences that involve a more longitudinal and thus diachronic timescale, which has been associated with the brain's intrinsic activity. Habits can be considered to reflect a balance between internally and externally guided DM, which implicates a particular temporal balance between diachronic and synchronic elements, thus linking two different timescales. Based on such evidence, we suggest a habit-based neurophilosophical approach of PH and PI by focusing on the empirically-based linkage between the synchronic and diachronic elements of habits. By doing so, we propose to link together what philosophically has been described and analyzed separately as PH and PI. (shrink)

In the last forty years, significant developments in neuroscience, psychology, and robotic technology have been cause for major trend changes in the philosophy of mind. One such shift has been the reallocation of focus from entirely brain-centered theories of mind to more embodied, embedded, and even extended answers to the questions, what are cognitive processes and where do we find such phenomena? Given that hypotheses such as Clark and Chalmers‘ (1998) Extended Mind or Hutto‘s (2006) Radical Enactivism, systematically undermine the (...) organism-bound, internal, and static pictures of minds and allow instead for the distribution of cognitive processes among brains, bodies, and worlds, a worry that arises is that the very subject of cognitive science, the ‗cognizer‘ will be hopelessly opaque, its mind leaking out into the world all over the place, thereby making it impossible to rein in and properly study. A seemingly unrelated and yet parallel trend has also taken place in feminist theorizing about the body over the last forty years. Whereas feminism of the 1970s and early 1980s tended to view ‗the body‘ as the site and matter of biological sex, while gender was a more fluid and socially constituted mode of existence, more recent feminist theory has questioned the givenness of bodies themselves. In other words, rather than seeing gender categories as manifestations of the already given sexed body, thinkers such as Butler (2000) and Lorber (1992) argue that the very notion of a body is often a product of scientific inquiry, which is itself a product of the power structures aiming to maintain a rigid binary between feminine and masculine gender roles. If the world at large plays such a constitutive role in determining who we are, then this implies that the tools we use, the language we speak, and the power relationships in which we are enmeshed are components of what it means to be embodied in any genuine sense. For thinkers like Haraway (1988) the image of the cyborg is most fitting for this new understanding of embodied subjects, as the cyborg is a coupling of machine and human. Gender and even biological sex will always be a technologically hybridized ‗monster‘ consisting of matter, machine, and mind. The overall aim of my project is thus to bring the two concurrent developments in theorizing about embodied subjects into discourse. As the cyborg features largely in recent feminist thought about embodiment, so too has it been a prominent metaphor in philosophy of mind, ever since Clark (2003) claimed that we ought to think of our ‗selves‘ more appropriately as Natural-Born Cyborgs. I therefore focus on this imagery as I go on to make the argument that this distributed account of cognition as well as of sexual identity is more fruitful for making progress in understanding ‗the human‘ more generally. Likewise, I argue that bringing the discussion of sex and gender into the arena of an otherwise asexual philosophy of mind, will shed light on some important facets of embodiment that have been overlooked but that ought to be addressed if we are to have an adequate account of ‗the proper subject of cognitive science.‘ My chapters include 1) a survey of the discourse between science and philosophy of mind leading to these embodied and extended approaches, 2) a first attempt at defending the extended mind thesis, 3) a discussion of how even the supposed resolution to the objections raised against extended cognition fails to properly take into account just how problematic subjectivity is, regardless of its being defined entirely organismic or not, as organisms themselves are highly malleable and socially constituted, 4) an explanation concerning how the same problematization of embodied subjectivity is ongoing in feminist theory, especially considering the phenomenology of transgendered embodiment, intersex, and technologically mediated bodies, 5) further elaboration on technologically enhanced bodies, exposing what I see as a continuum between bodies modified by ‗hard‘ technologies, such as implants, prostheses or surgeries, and those modified by ‗soft‘ technologies, such as gender norms, the social gaze, and technologically mediated metacognition, and last, 6) an argument for the image of the cyborg to replace ‗organism‘ in cognitive science, along with the corollary argument that cyborgs ought to represent not just embodied minds, but should also be the metaphor in attempting to understand ‗embodiment‘ more generally, which must, at its roots, be underpinned by gender and sexual identity. I argue that the imagery is fitting for the proper study of cognitive subjects as well as sexed and gendered bodies, but moreover, that just as the cyborg suggests a blending and hybridizing of seemingly unrelated elements, so too should the two areas of inquiry, philosophy of mind and feminist theory, pay heed to one another‘s use of this imagery and themselves begin to be more integrative in their approaches. (shrink)

If ordinary objects have temporal parts, then temporal predications have the following truth conditions: necessarily, ( a is F) at t iff a has a temporal part that is located at t and that is F. If ordinary objects have temporal counterparts, then, necessarily, ( a is F) at t iff a has a temporal counterpart that is located at t and that is F. The temporal-parts account allows temporal predication to be closed under the parthood relation: since all that (...) is required to be F at t is to have a temporal part, a t , that is located at t and that is F, every object that has a t as a temporal part is F at t . Similarly for the temporal-counterparts account. Both closure under parthood and closure under counterparthood are shown to have unacceptable consequences. Then strategies for avoiding closure are considered and rejected. (shrink)

Zwolennicy poznania rozproszonego deklarują odchodzenie od indywidualizmu metodologicznego i poznawczego w stronę ujęcia systemowego, na gruncie którego poznanie traktowane jest jako własność całego szerokiego systemu, a nie pojedynczego człowieka. W artykule skupiam się na problemie sprawczości systemu człowiek-artefakt i wykazuję, że przyjęcie perspektywy indywidualistycznej jest przy jego rozpatrywaniu niezbędne, a ujmowanie go jako systemu rozproszonego nie stanowi przewagi wyjaśniającej. Analizy reprezentacji zewnętrznych, afordancji i dizajnu, przeprowadzone przez Witolda Wachowskiego w książce Poznanie rozproszone. Od heurystyk do mechanizmów (2022), nie odchodzą od (...) podejścia skoncentrowanego na indywidualnym podmiocie, a zastosowana heurystyka „od kultury do mózgu” jest zgodna z podejściem podmiotowo-centrycznym. W artykule argumentuję, że wątpliwości wiązane z odrzuceniem indywidualizmu na rzecz ujęcia systemowego, przy analizie działalności poznawczej systemu człowiek-artefakt, przeważają nad racjami uzasadniającymi takie rozwiązanie. ----------------------------------------- Zgłoszono: 22/03/2023. Zrecenzowano: 10/01/2024. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 24/04/2024. (shrink)

In this paper, it is our purpose to argue for a processual conception of ill-person- identity. To do so, we will review some of the main answers that philosophy has given to the question of personal identity. We will review certain proposals on how to conceive illness and ill-person-identity, as well. Within the frame of a processual approach to ontology, we will focus on a non-dualistic processual-relational interpretation of biological organisms.

Can a person suffer radical change and still be the same person? Are there human beings who are not persons at all? Western philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thinkers, gave the concept of “person” great importance in their discussions. They saw it as crucial to our understanding of our world and our place in it. Prompted by tragedy — a loved one’s descent into dementia — Warren Bourgeois explored Western philosophical ideas to discover what constitutes a “person.” The (...) first edition of Persons — What Philosophers Say About You was the result of his search. This new second edition focuses on making this material easily available and accessible to students, and has been redesigned as an introduction to the philosophy of mind and its history, concentrating on the central concept of “person” in contemporary controversies concerning abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and human rights. Bourgeois has mined Western philosophy for ideas students can apply today as technology challenges their beliefs about what we are. He then uses the concept of person to unite the various subdivisions of philosophy, applying theories of knowledge, reality and value to help students understand what we believe about ourselves. The result is a living philosophy and an “introductory text with a difference.” While the ideas of the great philosophers cannot be meaningfully summarized in one introductory text, this book provides a comparison of what many of them say about the concept of person, and will encourage students to read further. (shrink)

One of Julian Barbour’s main aims is to solve the problem of time that appears in quantum geometrodynamics (QG). QG involves the application of canonical quantization procedure to the Hamiltonian formulation of General Relativity. The problem of time arises because the quantization of the Hamiltonian constraint results in an equation that has no explicit time parameter. Thus, it appears that the resulting equation, as apparently timeless, cannot describe evolution of quantum states. Barbour attempts to resolve the problem by allegedly eliminating (...) time from his interpretation of QG. In order to evaluate the efficacy of his solution, it is necessary to ascertain in what sense time has been eliminated from his theory. I proceed to do so by developing a form of conceptual analysis that is applicable to the concept of time in physical theories and applying this analysis to Barbour’s account. (shrink)

How do groups of people persist through time? Groups can change their members, locations, and structure. In this paper, I present puzzles of persistence applied to social groups. I first argue that four-dimensional theories better explain the context sensitivity of how groups persist. I then exploit two unique features of the social to argue for the stage theory of group persistence in particular. First, fusion and fission cases actually happen to social groups, and so cannot be marginalized as “pathological.” Second, (...) it is implausible that groups spatially coincide pre-fission. This means that theories that depend on pre-fission spatial coincidence, such as some endurance theories and the worm theory, cannot explain fission cases. All things considered, the stage theory offers the best explanation of how groups persist. (shrink)

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

1. What is the Problem of Personal Identity?Locke posed the problem of personal identity in one brief question, “What makes the same person?” This formulation is deceptively simple. My aim is to offer a new interpretation of the problem and to suggest a method for finding a solution.Investigations of personal identity are usually cast in terms of finding the criterion for personal identity. Yet talk of criteria is ambiguous. In one sense of the term, the criterion of personal identity would (...) be special evidence for personal identity. According to the second usage, the criterion of personal identity would be that state of affairs for which evidence for personal identity is evidence. We will not be concerned with the first construal. On that reading, the problem of personal identity would be an epistemological issue. But the basic question concerning personal identity, “What is one person?” does not appear to be an epistemological question. (shrink)

It seems to be a platitude of common sense that distinct ordinary objects cannot coincide, that they cannot fit into the same place or be composed of the same parts at the same time. The paradoxes of coincidence are instances of a breakdown of this platitude in light of counterexamples that are licensed by innocuous assumptions about particular kinds of ordinary object. Since both the anticoincidence principle and the assumptions driving the counterexamples flow from the folk conception of ordinary objects, (...) the paradoxes threaten this conception with inconsistency. Typical approaches to the paradoxes reject the anticoincidence principle or some portion of the assumptions driving the counterexamples, thereby partially revising our common conception of the world around us. This essay offers a compatibilist solution to the paradoxes that sustains the folk conception of ordinary objects in its entirety. According to this solution, the various cases of distinct coincidents do not clash with the anticoincidence principle since the cases and the principle manifest different yet compatible perspectives on the world. (shrink)

It is often argued that associations are intelligent organisms with minds and intentional states of their own. It is also argued that groups are merely a plurality of individuals who are related or associated only in a specific and limited sense. This paper draws on both classical and contemporary scholarship to develop an ontological account of persons which has real-world legal and ethical implications.

This analysis explores theories of recollective memories and their shortcomings to show how certain recollective memories are to some extent the initial experiencing of past conscious mental states. While dedicated memory theorists over the past century show remembering to be an active and subjective process, they usually make simplistic assumptions regarding the experience that is remembered. Their treatment of experience leaves unexplored the notion that the truth of memory is a dynamic interaction between experience and recollection. The argument's seven sections (...) examine how experience, consciousness, and the self produce memories in odd but actual situations. Examples are presented that are either actual or technologically possible, and they pose a challenge for some theories of memory. Showing that an experience and a memory must be bound by psychological continuity, the sections build upon each other to challenge aprioristic beliefs about the self and consciousness. The later sections examine the lack of available accounts of memory that acknowledge consciousness, dissociation, and "selfhood" to be matters of degree, thus rendering memory theories next to useless when trying to effectively incorporate the notions of experience and reality. (shrink)

Если личность (personhood) 1 -это качество или состояние, позволяющее быть отдельным лицом, то церебральностью (brainhood) можно назвать качество или состояние, позволяющее быть мозгом. Через это онтоло гическое качество определяется «церебральный субъект», получивший, по крайней мере, в индустриально развитых и высокомедикализирован-ных обществах, множество социальных описаний начиная с середины ХХ века. В статье исследуется историческое развитие церебральности. Предлагается рассмотреть мозг как необходимую область локализации «современного Я», и, следовательно, церебральный субъект - как антропологический тип современности (хотя бы потому, что современность придает высшую ценность (...) человеку как автономному агенту выбора и инициативы). Также утверждается, что идеология церебральности стала причиной возникновения множества нейроисследований, а не их следствием; показано, как разрастающийся комплекс нейрокультурных дискурсов и практик воплощает и поддерживает эту идеологию. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

In this article, I develop and defend a conception of psychological continuity that differs from the 'orthodox' conception in terms of overlapping chains of strongly connected mental states. By recognizing the importance of the (narrative) interrelatedness of qualitatively dissimilar mental contents, as well as the role of the body in psychological continuity, I argue, serious problems confronting the orthodox view can be solved.

Tyler Burge argues on the basis of an account of memory that the notion of quasimemory cannot be used to answer the circularity objection to psychological accounts of personal identity. His account implies the impossibility of the "Parfit people," creatures psychologically like us who undergo amoeba-like fission at the age of twenty-one, with only one offshoot allowed to survive, and who have "quareers," made up of the career of the original person and the career of the sole survivor, that exhibit (...) the same sort of psychological continuity that characterizes normal human careers, and are such that epistemic warrant is preserved across the episodes of fission and often involves quasimemories that are not memories. But what he says about memory does not support the denial that such creatures are possible. Where he thinks de se attitudes are necessary, de se * attitudes, indexed to quareers instead of to careers, would serve equally well. It is further argued that the circularity objection to psychological accounts can be answered without appeal to the notion of quasi-memory. Because of the internal relations between the causal profiles of mental states and the persistence conditions of their possessors, in principle there can be a "package deal" definition that simultaneously defines both. (shrink)

Tom Stoppard is justly praised by many for what are perceived as his technical skills as a dramatist—his wit, his seriousness, his mastery of parody and pastiche, his impressive control of dramatic structure. Stoppard earns his place as a giant of modern drama from these qualities. They, however, are not what concern me here. His plays are also in various ways riddled with philosophy. My purpose in this paper is to examine the claim that he is a philosopher's dramatist, rather (...) than a dramatist's dramatist or an ordinary thinking man's dramatist. I am not concerned with how far Stoppard himself as a matter of biographical fact may wish to make this claim, although Stoppard has made no secret of his fascination with Philosophy. I make the claim myself in order both to offer an interpretation of certain dramatic texts and to raise certain questions about philosophical method. I hope to show that to understand certain ways in which Stoppard's plays are philosophical is to appreciate something profound about the way in which philosophy and drama are akin—that is, I hope to make critical and philosophical points, not historical or biographical points. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that standard psychological continuity theory does not account for an important feature of what is important in survival—having the property of personhood. I offer a theory that can account for this, and I explain how it avoids the implausible consequences of standard psychological continuity theory, as well as having certain other advantages over that theory.

I compare three sorts of case in which philosophers have argued that we cannot assert the Law of Excluded Middle for statements of identity. Adherents of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis deny that Excluded Middle holds for statements saying that an infinitesimal is identical with zero. Derek Parfit contended that, in certain sci-fi scenarios, the Law does not hold for some statements of personal identity. He also claimed that it fails for the statement ‘England in 1065 was the same nation as England (...) in 1067’. I argue that none of these cases poses a serious threat to Excluded Middle. My analysis of the last example casts doubt on the principle of the Determinacy of Distinctness. While David Wiggins's ‘conceptualist realism’ provides a metaphysics which can dispense with that principle, it leaves no house-room for infinitesimals. (shrink)