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  1. Evaluation and Objections to Judith Thomson in "People and their Bodies".Seth Carter - forthcoming - GRIN Publishing.
    In her essay, “People and their Bodies,” Judith Thomson writes an evaluation of several formulations of the psychological criterion for personal identity and attempts a strategy of criticizing each formulation of the psychological theory. This is done in order to conclude that a physical theory must be the only remaining viable sufficient candidate for explaining personal identity that is both necessary and sufficient, despite its theoretical weaknesses. This paper seeks to analyze Thomson's critique and explain why her chosen formulations of (...)
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  2. Thought experiments, sentience, and animalism.Margarida Hermida - 2023 - Synthese 202 (5):148.
    Animalism is prima facie the most plausible view about what we are; it aligns better with science and common sense, and is metaphysically more parsimonious. Thought experiments involving the brain, however, tend to elicit intuitions contrary to animalism. In this paper, I examine two classical thought experiments from the literature, brain transplant and cerebrum transplant, and a new one, cerebrum regeneration. I argue that they are theoretically possible, but that a scientifically informed account of what would actually happen shows that (...)
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  3. (1 other version)On Scepticism About Personal Identity Thought Experiments.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, Caroline West & Wen Yu - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 1.
    Many philosophers have become sceptical of the use of thought experiments in theorising about personal identity. In large part this is due to work in experimental philosophy that appears to confirm long held philosophical suspicions that thought experiments elicit inconsistent judgements about personal identity, and hence judgements that are thought to be the product of cognitive biases. If so, these judgements appear to be useless at informing our theories of personal identity. Using the methods of experimental philosophy, we investigate whether (...)
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  4. Can Thought Experiments Solve Problems of Personal Identity?Lukas J. Meier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-23.
    Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...)
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  5. Brain Death: What We Are and When We Die.Lukas J. Meier - 2020 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    When does a human being cease to exist? For millennia, the answer to this question had remained largely unchanged: death had been diagnosed when heartbeat and breathing were permanently absent. Only comparatively recently, in the 1950s, rapid developments in intensive-care medicine called into question this widely accepted criterion. What had previously been deemed a permanent cessation of vital functions suddenly became reversible. -/- A new criterion of death was needed. It was suggested that the destruction of the brain could indicate (...)
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  6. Esperimenti mentali in filosofia.Andrea Guardo - 2019 - Milano-Udine: Mimesis.
    Spesso i filosofi paiono pensare di poter trarre conclusioni radicali sulla base di una semplice discussione di scenari immaginari, scenari che a volte sembrerebbero tratti da un racconto di fantascienza. Questo stile argomentativo lascia molti studenti (e anche alcuni filosofi di professione) perplessi: come può il semplice riflettere su di uno scenario immaginario permetterci di trarre conclusioni su come stanno le cose nella realtà? Questo volume cerca di giustificare l'uso di esperimenti mentali in filosofia, concentrandosi su due casi studio, entrambi (...)
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  7. The Unimportance of Being Any Future Person.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):745-750.
    Derek Parfit’s argument against the platitude that identity is what matters in survival does not work given his intended reading of the platitude, namely, that what matters in survival to some future time is being identical with someone who is alive at that time. I develop Parfit’s argument so that it works against the platitude on this intended reading.
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  8. Thought experiments in personal identity: A dialogue with Beck, Wagner and Wilkes.Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera - 2017 - South African Journal of Philosophy 36 (4):456-469.
    In a recent series of papers, Beck and Wagner have been arguing about the general role that thought experiments can play in the debate on personal identity, showing their disagreement about the famous criticisms that Wilkes’ launched against their use. In this article I come back to Wilkes’ criticisms to show that her position is deeply problematic. If we adopt instead the mental model account of thought experiments, we can accommodate Wilkes’ criticisms and justify the use of thought experiments in (...)
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  9. The animal, the corpse, and the remnant-person.Andrea Sauchelli - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (1):205–218.
    I argue that a form of animalism that does not include the belief that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal has a dialectical advantage over other versions of animalism. The main reason for this advantage is that Phase Animalism, the version of animalism described here, has the theoretical resources to provide convincing descriptions of the outcomes of scenarios problematic for other forms of animalism. Although Phase Animalism rejects the claim that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal, it is still appealing to those (...)
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  10. Zwölf Antworten auf Williams' Paradox.Marc Andree Weber - 2017 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 71 (1):128-154.
    Theories of personal identity face a paradox, which traces back to Bernard Williams: some scenarios obviously show that mental continuity is what solely matters in survival; others, on the contrary, show with equal obviousness that it is bodily continuity. Different authors have produced diverging and partly conflicting answers in response to that problem. Based on recent research concerning the structure of philosophical thought experiment, this paper reevaluates and, for the first time, neatly classifies those answers. What is more, several existing (...)
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  11. Reconsidering a transplant: A response to Wagner.Simon Beck - 2016 - South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (2):132-140.
    Nils-Frederic Wagner takes issue with my argument that influential critics of “transplant” thought experiments make two cardinal mistakes. He responds that the mistakes I identify are not mistakes at all. The mistakes are rather on my part, in that I have not taken into account the conceptual genesis of personhood, that my view of thought experiments is idiosyncratic and possibly self-defeating, and in that I have ignored important empirical evidence about the relationship between brains and minds. I argue that my (...)
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  12. Transplanting brains?Nils-Frederic Wagner - 2016 - South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (1):18-27.
    Brain transplant thought experiments figure prominently in the debate on personal identity. Such hypotheticals are usually taken to provide support for psychological continuity theories. This standard interpretation has recently been challenged by Marya Schechtman. Simon Beck argues that Schechtman's critique rests upon ‘two costly mistakes’—claiming that (1) when evaluating these cases, philosophers mistakenly try to figure out the intuitions that they think people inhabiting such a possible world ought to have, instead of pondering their own intuitions. Beck further asserts that (...)
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  13. Brain transplants and possible worlds: A response to Beck.Nils-Frederic Wagner - 2016 - South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (2):141-144.
    I am very grateful to Simon Beck for his thoughtful response to my paper “Transplanting Brains?” (2016). Needless to say, he raises more issues than I can hope to answer in a brief response. While Beck seemingly feels that the deck has been stacked against him, I think that the majority of his criticisms result from misconceptions and misunderstandings that I intend to straighten out in what follows. Before proceeding, I would like to draw attention to a worry that is (...)
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  14. Embodied mind sparsism.Stuart Clint Dowland - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1853-1872.
    If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with (...)
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  15. Transplant Thought-Experiments: Two costly mistakes in discounting them.Simon Beck - 2014 - South African Journal of Philosophy 33 (2):189-199.
    ‘Transplant’ thought-experiments, in which the cerebrum is moved from one body to another, have featured in a number of recent discussions in the personal identity literature. Once taken as offering confirmation of some form of psychological continuity theory of identity, arguments from Marya Schechtman and Kathleen Wilkes have contended that this is not the case. Any such apparent support is due to a lack of detail in their description or a reliance on predictions that we are in no position to (...)
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  16. Die Zerlegung des Ichs. Über die Grundlagen personaler Identität.Marc Andree Weber - 2013 - Münster: Mentis.
    Können wir als Personen irreversible Gedächtnisverluste überleben? Wie steht es mit Teletransportationen? Wie mit jahrelangem Einfrieren? Fragen wie diese sind weit davon entfernt, bloße Denksportaufgaben für Science-Fiction-Fans zu sein. Vielmehr verraten uns Antworten darauf, welche unserer Eigenschaften uns wirklich wichtig sind und was unser Wesen ausmacht. -/- Unglücklicherweise beantworten Vertreter unterschiedlicher Theorien personaler Identität diese Fragen auf völlig verschiedene Weise. Manche schöpfen die Plausibilität ihrer Positionen aus phantasievollen Gedankenexperimenten; anderen sind dieselben Gedankenexperimente für eine ernsthafte Einbeziehung in die philosophische Theoriebildung (...)
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  17. Soulless Organisms?David B. Hershenov - 2011 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85 (3):465-482.
    It is worthwhile comparing Hylomorphic and Animalistic accounts of personal identity since they both identify the human animal and the human person.The topics of comparison will be three: The first is accounting for our intuitions in cerebrum transplant and irreversible coma cases. Hylomorphism, unlike animalism, appears to capture “commonsense” beliefs here, preserves the maxim that identity matters, and does not run afoul of the Only x and y rule. The next topic of comparison reveals how the rival explanations of transplants (...)
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  18. (1 other version)Externalism and Brain Transplants.Rory Madden - 2011 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 6. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
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  19. Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning.Tim Campbell & Jeff McMahan - 2010 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (4):285-301.
    We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism —the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning : dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.
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  20. Are we our brains?Stephen Burwood - 2009 - Philosophical Investigations 32 (2):113-133.
    My aim in this paper is to destabilise the brain-is-self thesis, something that is now regarded in some quarters as philosophical commonsense. My contention is that it is the epithelial body that enters into the formation of our sense of self and that largely bears the burden of personal identity as well as playing the key role in grounding our psychological ascriptions. Lacking any sensorimotor or social presence of its own, the brain by itself cannot "underlie" selfhood, but only as (...)
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  21. Perspectivism and Intersubjective Criteria for Personal Identity: A Defense of Bernard Williams' Criterion of Bodily Continuity.Tristan Guillermo Torriani - 2008 - Princípios 15 (23):153-190.
    In this article I revisit earlier stages of the discussion of personal identity, before Neo-Lockean psychological continuity views became prevalent. In particular, I am interested in Bernard Williams’ initial proposal of bodily identity as a necessary, although not sufficient, criterion of personal identity. It was at this point that psychological continuity views came to the fore arguing that bodily identity was not necessary because brain transplants were logically possible, even if physically impossible. Further proposals by Shoemaker of causal relations between (...)
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  22. Transplantation and identity: a dangerous split?Edgardo D. Carosella & Thomas Pradeu - 2006 - The Lancet 368 (9531):183--184.
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  23. (2 other versions)Shoemaker’s Problem of Too Many Thinkers.David B. Hershenov - 2006 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80:225-236.
    Shoemaker maintains that when a functionalist theory of mind is combined with his belief about individuating properties and the well-known cerebrumtransplant thought experiment, the resulting position will be a version of the psychological approach to personal identity that can avoid The Problem of Too Many Thinkers. I maintain that the costs of his solution—that the human animal is incapable of thought—are too high. Shoemaker also has not provided an argumentagainst there existing a merely conscious being that is not essentially self-conscious (...)
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  24. An Alternative to Brain Death.Jeff McMahan - 2006 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (1):44-48.
    Most contributors to the debate about brain death, including Dr. James Bernat, share certain assumptions. They believe that the concept of death is univocal, that death is a biological phenomenon, that it is necessarily irreversible, that it is paradigmatically something that happens to organisms, that we are human organisms, and therefore that our deaths will be deaths of organisms. These claims are supposed to have moral significance. It is, for example, only when a person dies that it is permissible to (...)
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  25. Our Identity, Responsibility and Biology.Simon Beck - 2004 - Philosophical Papers:3-14.
    Eric Olson argues in The Human Animal that thought-experiments involving body-swapping do not in the end offer any support to psychological continuity theories, nor do they pose any threat to his Biological View. I argue that he is mistaken in at least the second claim.
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  26. How to Be a Conventional Person.Kristie Miller - 2004 - The Monist 87 (4):457-474.
    Recent work in personal identity has emphasized the importance of various conventions, or ‘person-directed practices’ in the determination of personal identity. An interesting question arises as to whether we should think that there are any entities that have, in some interesting sense, conventional identity conditions. We think that the best way to understand such work about practices and conventions is the strongest and most radical. If these considerations are correct, persons are, on our view, conventional constructs: they are in part (...)
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  27. Brain transplants and the orthodox view of personhood.Gavin J. Fairbairn - 2002 - In Robert N. Fisher (ed.), Suffering, Death, and Identity. New York: Rodopi.
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  28. (1 other version)The Survival of the Sentient.Peter Unger - 2000 - Philosophical Perspectives 14:325-348.
    In this quite modestly ambitious essay, I'll generally just assume that, for the most part, our "scientifically informed" commonsense view of the world is true. Just as it is with such unthinking things as planets, plates and, I suppose, plants, too, so it also is with all earthly thinking beings, from people to pigs and pigeons; each occupies a region of space, however large or small, in which all are spatially related to each other. Or, at least, so it is (...)
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  29. (1 other version)E.J. Lowe, Subjects Of Experience. [REVIEW]Katarzyna Paprzycka - 1997 - Philosophy in Review 17:45-47.
  30. One self: The logic of experience.Arnold Zuboff - 1990 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 33 (1):39-68.
    Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and (...)
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  31. Consciousness and Self-Identity.Peter Unger - 1986 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1):63-100.
  32. The Identities of Persons. [REVIEW]S. P. - 1977 - Review of Metaphysics 31 (1):123-124.
    This collection of twelve essays on the problem of persons is divided into two general themes. Essays on "identity and physical continuity" are presented by: Lewis, Rey, Perry, Parfit, Shoemaker, and Wiggins, while Dennett, Williams, de Sousa, Frankfurt, Penelhum, and Taylor write on "social and moral conditions of personhood." A. O. Rorty’s introduction is especially lucid, arguing that the concept of a person must, finally, be treated as a moral one. With advances in technology, e.g., the plausibility of brain transplants (...)
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  33. The bodies of persons.Douglas C. Long - 1974 - Journal of Philosophy 71 (10):291-301.
    Much mischief concerning the concept of a human body is generated by the failure of philosophers to distinguish various important senses of the term 'body.' I discuss three of those senses and illustrate the issues they can generate by discussing the concept of a Lockean exchange of bodies as well as the brain-body switch.
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  34. (5 other versions)Self-knowledge and Self-identity. By Shoemaker Sydney. [REVIEW]Antony Flew - 1964 - Philosophy 39 (149):275-277.
  35. (1 other version)Can a person break a world record?Henk Bij de Weg - manuscript
    Most philosophers in the analytical philosophy answer the question what personal identity is in psychological terms. Arguments for substantiating this view are mainly based on thought experiments of brain transfer cases and the like in which persons change brains. However, in these thought experiments the remaining part of the body plays only a passive part. In this paper I argue that the psychological approach of personal identity cannot be maintained, if the whole body is actively involved in the analysis, and (...)
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