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About this topic
Summary The literature on personal identity is vast, and it incorporates a grab-bag of varying approaches, theses, and conceptual understandings.  It is very loosely unified by investigations into the "identities" of "persons," but these are concepts with multiple senses.  This category reflects that diversity.
Key works Alongside discussions of key historical works by John Locke and David Hume (see Perry 1975), investigation into personal identity of many stripes in the contemporary literature has been led by Shoemaker 1963, Williams 1973, Parfit 1984, Noonan 1989, Schechtman 1996, Olson 1997, among others.
Introductions Good introductions in Perry 1975, Rorty 1976, and Olson 2002.
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657 found
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  1. Illuminating Time Travel - Liang On Forward Time Travel: Three Possible Hypotheses.Jeffrey Camlin - manuscript
    This paper provides a structured response to Jingkai Liang’s On Forward Time Travel, focusing on forward time travel paradigms: “stretched-out streaks,” where travelers experience slowed passage of time, and “broken streaks,” representing instantaneous leaps forward. Using the Philosophy of Ethical Empirical Rationalism, we introduce three key insights—termed Hume’s Beacons—to examine continuity of identity, the measurability of time, and the ethical considerations involved in skipping time. Each insight is explored through hypotheses rooted in empirical observation, rational justification, and ethical application, offering (...)
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  2. Can Views on Personal Identity Be Neutral about Ethics?Marek Gurba - manuscript
    Eric Olson and David Shoemaker argue that our numerical identity over time is irrelevant to such practical issues as moral responsibility or self-concern. Being the same individual at different moments in time may, in our case, can be seen as the preservation of the relevant biological processes (e.g., according to Olson), while psychological continuity, independent of these processes, may be crucial for such issues. I will defend the view that, contrary to the above authors, any conception of our diachronic identity (...)
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  3. Why Am I Me and Not Someone Else?Tim Klaassen - manuscript
    In this article I discuss the seeming contingency of the fact that one is the specific person that one is. Here, I propose that this contingency is illusory.
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  4. Relativistic Implications for Physical Copies of Conscious States.Andrew Knight - manuscript
    The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner’s Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence of these evolutions (...)
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  5. Individual Consciousness.Roderick Malcolm MacLeod - manuscript
    If there is a plurality of absolutely separate individual conscious existences, corresponding to individual living organisms, then the directly experienced fact that only a particular one of these consciousnesses, one's own, stands out as immediately present, can not be true absolutely, but only relative to some specific context of conditions and qualifications singling out that particular consciousness. But further consideration demonstrates that it is not possible for any such context to be specified. This implies that all conscious existences must ultimately (...)
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  6. The Dissolution of the Ego in Freud's Resolution of the Uncanny.Donovan Miyasaki - manuscript
    Freud’s discussion of uncanny [unheimlich] experiences focuses on their peculiar ambivalence. On his view, the uncanny is a paradoxical feeling of both familiarity and alienation. While Freud’s analysis of this paradoxical feeling does succeed in explaining it away, it does little to explain it. One might expect a psychoanalytical demystification of the real experience that is hidden behind the superstitious overtones of uncanny experiences. Instead, the uncanny is attributed rather anti- climactically to the combination of a previous superstition (maintained unconsciously) (...)
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  7. The Existential Passage Hypothesis.David Robert - manuscript
    In this paper, I argue for what I call the extended existential passage hypothesis, which entails, for example, that even if reality contains nothing supernatural and if property dualism is true, then death is not the end of a person’s stream of consciousness, that is, a person’s stream of consciousness continues at the moment of death, devoid of his or her memories and personality traits, as the stream of consciousness of another person (or another being) who is conceived and gains (...)
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  8. The Self, Self-knowledge, and a Flattened Path to Self-improvement.Robert D. Rupert - manuscript
    This essay explores the connection between theories of the self and theories of self-knowledge, arguing (a) that empirical results strongly support a certain negative thesis about the self, a thesis about what the self isn’t, and (b) that a more promising account of the self makes available unorthodox – but likely apt – ways of characterizing self-knowledge. Regarding (a), I argue that the human self does not appear at a personal level the autonomous (or quasi-autonomous) status of which might provide (...)
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  9. The Metaphysics and Politics of Being a Person.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a (...)
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  10. Filmul Solaris, regia Andrei Tarkovsky – Aspecte psihologice și filosofice.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    În acest eseu evidențiez principalele aspecte psihologice și filosofice desprinse din filmul Solaris regizat de Andrei Tarkovski, precum și tehnicile cinematografice utilizate de regizor pentru a-și transmite mesajele spectatorului. În ”Introducere” prezint pe scurt elementele relevante din biografia lui Tarkovski și o prezentare generală a romanului Solaris a lui Stanislav Lem și filmul Solaris în regia lui Andrei Tarkovsky. În ”Tehnica cinematografică” vorbesc despre ritmul specific al scenelor, mișcarea radicală declanșată de Tarkovsky în cinematografia modernă, rolul elementelor simbolice și iconice, (...)
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  11. From Brain to Cosmos (Preliminary Revised Edition).Mark Sharlow - manuscript
    This is a draft for a revised edition of Mark Sharlow's book "From Brain to Cosmos." It includes most of the material from the first edition, two shorter pieces pertaining to the book, and a detailed new introduction.
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  12. Immortality and Identity.Alexey Turchin - manuscript
    We need to understand personal identity to develop radical life extension technologies: mind uploading, cryonics, digital immortality, and quantum (big world) immortality. A tentative solution is needed now, due to the opportunity cost of delaying indirect digital immortality and cryonics. However, solving the problem of personal identity is not easy. Human personal identity is a complex thing, not similar to other types of identity, such as that of Theseus ship. First of all, human identity consists of two intertwined types of (...)
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  13. The evolved self has agency, purpose, and unity.J. H. van Hateren - manuscript
    Recently developed extensions of evolutionary theory are used to explain the human self as an evolved, unitary, and purposeful phenomenon. A basic mechanism that can generate life's agency and goal-directedness is combined with mechanisms that can account for awareness by and of the self, and for the social characteristics of humans. The new theory is largely consistent with major existing theories of the self, in particular theories centred on self-esteem, self-determination theory, and terror management theory. It can therefore be regarded (...)
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  14. Mind uploading.Joe Strout - manuscript
  15. You could be immaterial (or not).Andrew M. Bailey - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    Materialists about human persons say that we are, and must be, wholly material beings. Substance dualists say that we are, and must be, wholly immaterial. In this paper, I take issue with the “and must be” bits. Both materialists and substance dualists would do well to reject modal extensions of their views and instead opt for contingent doctrines, or doctrines that are silent about those modal extensions. Or so I argue.
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  16. 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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  17. Animalidad, otredad e inmortalidad en "El inmortal".Juan Pablo Jorge - forthcoming - Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura.
    En el presente trabajo, analizamos el cuento El Inmortal de Borges prestándole principal atención a las situaciones donde se entrelazan, o se tratan sin diferenciar demasiado, cuestiones vinculadas con la animalidad y la divinidad. Sostenemos que esta especie de confusión o falta de precisión al tratar cuestiones que se alejan tanto de la identidad personal y del Yo, como la inmortalidad, no es un elemento casual ni sin fundamento, sino que puede ser analizado filosóficamente adentrándonos la otredad animal. El Inmortal (...)
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  18. Identity: this time it's personal.Stephen Kearns - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The view that it is possible for someone to think at a time without existing at that time is not only perfectly coherent but in harmony with an attractive externalist view of the mental. Furthermore, it offers plausible solutions to various puzzles of personal identity.
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  19. Van narratieve tot dialogische identiteit. Identiteit en refiguratie tijdens de Keti Koti Tafel.Machiel Keestra - forthcoming - Filosofie En Praktijk.
    How can personal identity be determined in such a way that developments, experiences and other dynamic and context-dependent aspects of that identity can be taken into account? For several decades now, the narrative, the story, has often been referred to in answering this question as a cognitive instrument that can adequately deal with those aspects. The monologue thus appears to present itself as a medium in which personal or autobiographical identity is formed. However, what happens when we place the identity (...)
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  20. Biometrics and the Metaphysics of Personal Identity.Amy Kind - forthcoming - IET Biometrics.
    The vast advances in biometrics over the past several decades have brought with them a host of pressing concerns. Philosophical scrutiny has already been devoted to many of the relevant ethical and political issues, especially ones arising from matters of privacy, bias, and security in data collection. But philosophers have devoted surprisingly little attention to the relevant metaphysical issues, in particular, ones concerning matters of personal identity. This paper aims to take some initial steps to correct this oversight. After discussing (...)
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  21. Introspection in the African Tradition.Thaddeus Metz - forthcoming - In Anna Giustina (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Introspection. Routledge.
    My first aim in the chapter is to provide an overview of African epistemology, partly to acquaint the reader with the field and partly to show that introspection as a source of knowledge has yet to receive any sustained consideration in it. In the rest of the essay I expound and motivate as prima facie plausible the characteristically African view that one’s personal identity is essentially (even if not exhaustively) relational in some way and argue that, if that view were (...)
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  22. The Substance View and Cases of Complicated Multifetal Pregnancy.Prabhpal Singh - forthcoming - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry:1-8.
    I consider cases of multifetal pregnancy in which one fetus with a fatal birth defect poses a risk to the survival of another healthy fetus to show that the substance view anti-abortion position leads to a contradiction. In cases of complicated multifetal pregnancy, if intervention by selective abortion to terminate the defective fetus is not performed, both fetuses will die due to the conditions created by the defective fetus’s fatal birth defect. Because abortion is wrong on the anti-abortion position, and (...)
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  23. Remembering moral and immoral actions in constructing the self.Matthew L. Stanley, Paul Henne & Felipe De Brigard - forthcoming - Memory and Cognition.
    Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we (...)
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  24. De Se Modal Illusions.Clas Weber - forthcoming - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
    Research on personal identity often relies on imaginary cases and tends to theorise about our nature from the first-person perspective. In this paper I argue that a problem arises when we combine the two methods and assess imaginary cases from the first-person perspective. The problem is that the link between de se imagination and modality is broken. De se imagination regularly gives rise to de se modal illusions. De se modal illusions come in two varieties: there are de se illusions (...)
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  25. Anticipation and Prudential Concern.Clas Weber - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    There is an intimate connection between personal identity, prudential concern, and anticipation. But just how close is the connection? In this paper, I develop and motivate phenomenal accounts of both anticipation and prudential concern which suggest that the link between anticipation and personal identity and the one between anticipation and prudential concern is less tight than often assumed. I start by arguing against two influential accounts of anticipation, and present an alternative view based on the notion of phenomenal continuity, which (...)
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  26. Selective Optimism about Mind-Uploading.Clas Weber - 2025 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 32 (1):215-235.
    Optimists about mind-uploading believe that we can survive uploading. Pessimists about mind-uploading, on the other hand, believe that we cannot survive uploading. An under-explored middle ground between the two is a selective form of optimism, which claims that we can survive some forms of uploading, such as gradual replacement uploading, but not others, such as scan-and-copy uploading. Is selective optimism about uploading a rational stance? In this paper I argue that the answer is yes. The paper has a negative and (...)
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  27. The social identity affordance view: A theory of social identities.Alejandro Arango & Adam Burgos - 2024 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 62 (2):162-177.
    This article proposes that social identities are best understood as a kind of affordance, a “social identity affordance.” Social identity affordances are possibilities for action and interaction between persons, within a social niche, based on perceived and self-perceived social group identification. First, the view presented captures and articulates the basic structure of social identities. Second, it explains the multifaceted interplay of such an item in the social field, including not only the complexity of the interpersonal dimensions, but also the multiplicity (...)
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  28. The identity of what? Pluralism, practical interests, and individuation.Vilius Dranseika, Shaun Nichols & David Shoemaker - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (3):757-773.
    In this paper, we present a set of preregistered studies inspired by both Lockean pluralism about individuation and discussions of conjoined twinning in the contemporary personal identity debate. In combination, these studies provide evidence of folk pluralism about individuation of “individuals like us” and also ways in which individuation judgments are integral to practical interests. First, our studies show that individuation judgments depend on a sortal supplied. Study participants tend to see two people or persons but only one organism in (...)
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  29. If presentism is false, then I don’t exist. On common-sense presentism.Jean-Baptiste Guillon - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-36.
    For many presentist philosophers, e.g. Zimmerman (Contemp Debates Metaphys 10:211–225, 2008), a central motivation in favour of presentism is that it is supposed to be part of common sense. But the fact that common-sense intuitions are indeed presentist is usually taken for granted (and sometimes also conceded by eternalists). As has been shown in other domains of philosophy (e.g. free will), we should be careful when attributing some supposed intuitions to common sense, and Torrengo (Phenomenology and Mind 12: 50–55, 2017) (...)
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  30. From P-Zombies to Substance Dualism.Perry Hendricks - 2024 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (11):110-121.
    P-zombies are creatures that are physically (functionally, behaviourally) like you and I and yet lack phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are possible, it’s (typically) taken to show property dualism is true: phenomenal consciousness isn’t reducible to – nor does it supervene on – physical states. If inverted qualia are possible, it’s possible that you and I have identical physical states and yet you see tomatoes as green and I see tomatoes as red. If this is the case, then (again) property (...)
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  31. Conventionalist Accounts of Personal Identity Over Time.David Mark Kovacs - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (8):e13016.
    Conventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our “conventions”). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. public, doxastic vs. non-doxastic, and realizer-relative vs. assessor-relative varieties of conventionalism. Second, it reviews (...)
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  32. The marriage of astrology and AI: A model of alignment with human values and intentions.Kenneth McRitchie - 2024 - Correlation 36 (1):43-49.
    Astrology research has been using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the understanding of astrological properties and processes. Like the large language models of AI, astrology is also a language model with a similar underlying linguistic structure but with a distinctive layer of lifestyle contexts. Recent research in semantic proximities and planetary dominance models have helped to quantify effective astrological information. As AI learning and intelligence grows, a major concern is with maintaining its alignment with human values and intentions. Astrology has (...)
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  33. Assessor Relative Conativism.Kristie Miller - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (1):96-115.
    According to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated at another person-stage's context, because person-stages have different patterns of conative attitudes. I present several reasons to embrace assessor relative conativism over its more familiar realizer relative (...)
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  34. Does Panpsychism Mean that "We Are All One"?Hedda Hassel Mørch - 2024 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 31 (9-10):88-112.
    Panpsychism is the view that all things are associated with consciousness. Panpsychism has a number of significant theoretical implications, with respect to the mind–body problem and other problems in metaphysics. Here I will consider one of its potential practical or ethical implications; specifically, whether, if panpsychism is true, it follows that “we are all one”, in a sense that implies that egoism (understood as bias towards what we normally take to constitute the self or ego) is not only immoral but (...)
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  35. Persona e tempo. Per una fenomenologia temporale della persona.Simone A. Santamato - 2024 - Mimesis Scenari.
    In the present paper, I analyze the Husserlian theory of time from a phenomenology of person perspective. I suggest that the phenomenological concept of time – especially considering the notions of ritentional modifications and sinking – is strictly related with the personal individuation. Hence, my argument is that personhood is developed with latent and subliminal inclinations too, opening a new discussion regarding the reliability of the eidetic-reductive method in characterology.
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  36. The epistemic objection against perdurantism.Emanuele Tullio & Tommaso Soriani - 2024 - Synthese 204 (3):1-20.
    According to Perdurantism, persons are identical to maximal aggregates of appropriately interrelated temporal parts. Within the Perdurantist framework, an epistemic concern arises, targeting the perduring persons’ belief that they are persons, suggesting that, ultimately, they are not in a position to know that they are persons as opposed to temporal parts. Despite the consideration it has received over the years, this concern has not yet been converted into a full-fledged objection. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring the (...)
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  37. Holism, Narrative, and Paradox: New Criteria for Settling Disputes in Personal Identity.Jaron Cheung - 2023 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 9 (2):1-20.
    This paper introduces three new criteria that a theory of personal identity ought to satisfy: (1) material holism, (2) narrative unity, and (3) narrative integrity. Material holism guards against the undesirable consequence of positing the person as part and existentially distinct from the organismal whole, of which it is dependent and interconnected. Narrative unity ensures that continuity between the beginning, middle, and end of a human life is sufficiently accounted for. Narrative integrity secures fidelity and congruence between each part and (...)
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  38. Can Human Rights Law Protect Against Humiliation?Deepa Kansra - 2023 - Psychology Today Blog.
    Humiliation, as dealt with under different legal jurisdictions, poses a question about how these systems perceive and respond to humiliation. Are the laws' definitions, approach, and punishment appropriately determined? And if there are challenges to implementation, what are they?
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  39. The Science and Religion Forum Discuss Information and Reality: Questions for Religions and Science.Finley I. Lawson - 2023 - Zygon 58 (3):678-682.
    The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) promotes discussion on issues at the interface of science and religion. The forum membership is diverse and it holds an annual conference to encourage exploration of issues that arise at the interface of science and religion. This article provides an overview of the hybrid conference that took place at the Woodbrooke Centre in Birmingham in May 2022. The conference addressed the issue of information and reality for religions and science across two broad themes. The (...)
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  40. Understanding a Thing's Nature: Comparing Afro-Relational and Western-Individualist Ontologies (Repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - In Peter Aloysius Ikhane & Isaac E. Ukpokolo (eds.), African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 63-78.
    Slightly modified reprint of an article first appearing in the journal _Synthesis Philosophica_ (2018).
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  41. (1 other version)Does Cognitive Psychology Imply Pluralism About the Self?Christopher Register - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (1):1-18.
    Psychologists and philosophers have recently argued that our concepts of ‘person’ or ‘self’ are plural. Some have argued that we should also adopt a corresponding pluralism about the metaphysics of the self. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I sketch and motivate an approach to personal identity that supports the inference from facts about how we think about the self to facts about the nature of the self. On the proposed view, the self-concept partly determines the nature of (...)
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  42. Three Moral Themes of Leibniz's Spiritual Machine Between "New System" and "New Essays".Markku Roinila - 2023 - le Present Est Plein de L’Avenir, Et Chargé du Passé : Vorträge des Xi. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, 31. Juli – 4. August 2023.
    The advance of mechanism in science and philosophy in the 17th century created a great interest to machines or automata. Leibniz was no exception - in an early memoir Drôle de pensée he wrote admiringly about a machine that could walk on water, exhibited in Paris. The idea of automatic processing in general had a large role in his thought, as can be seen, for example, in his invention of the binary code and the so-called Calculemus!-model for solving controversies. In (...)
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  43. Verbalismus, Epistemizismus und die Debatte um personale Identität.Knoll Viktoria - 2023 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 77 (4):484-504.
    It is a startling fact that, despite its long and rich history, the debate about per- sonal identity is far from settled. The present paper examines two deflationary explanations for this: a) the dispute is merely verbal (verbalism); b) there cannot be sufficient justification for preferring one theory of personal identity over the others (epistemicism). As this paper argues, there is evidence that either verba- lism or epistemicism provides a correct account of the personal identity debate.
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  44. Persons, Eliminativism, and Context. [REVIEW]Nilanjan Das - 2022 - Philosophy East and West 72 (2):548-561.
    Mark Siderits’ Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy is a rich and wide-ranging volume. It is an exercise in what Siderits calls “fusion philosophy,” where the theoretical resources invented by one philosophical tradition are used to solve problems for another. The aim of this book, therefore, is to show how innovations in Buddhist philosophy in Sanskrit can help us make progress in contemporary debates about the nature of persons and personal identity. Here, I think, the book is a success. Not only (...)
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  45. Persistence Without Personhood: A New Model.Joseph Gottlieb - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):346-364.
    I am a person. But am I fundamentally and essentially a person? The animalist says no. So must the phenomenal continuity theorist, or so I will argue. Even if, contra animalism, we cannot survive zombification, being a subject of experience is not sufficient for being a person, and phenomenal continuity is not sufficient for our survival as the same person over time. These observations point the way to a positive account of personhood, and provide further insight into the conditions under (...)
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  46. Plasticity, Numerical Identity, and Transitivity.Samuel Kahn - 2022 - International Philosophical Quarterly 62 (3):289-299.
    In a recent paper, Chunghyoung Lee argues that, because zygotes are developmentally plastic, they cannot be numerically identical to the singletons into which they develop, thereby undermining conceptionism. In this short paper, I respond to Lee. I argue, first, that, on the most popular theories of personal identity, zygotic plasticity does not undermine conceptionism, and, second, that, even overlooking this first issue, Lee’s plasticity argument is problematic. My goal in all of this is not to take a stand in the (...)
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  47. "What is Holding Us Together? David Hume, Edgar Allan Poe and the Problem of Association".Maya Kronfeld - 2022 - Review of English Studies.
    Poe’s experimental fiction revitalizes Hume’s ambivalent empiricism, the complexities of which were sometimes obscured in the philosopher’s nineteenth-century American reception. Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ broaches formally the question of how one thought leads to another, while ‘The Man that Was Used Up’ stages the question of what grounds the unity of one’s thoughts. Reading both tales together exposes the scope and limits of an associationist paradigm often traced back to Hume. But reading Hume through Poe’s verbal art reveals (...)
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  48. Science, Religion, and Human Identity: Contributions From the Science and Religion Forum.Finley Lawson - 2022 - Zygon 57 (3):595-598.
    The Science and Religion Forum promotes discussion on issues at the interface of science and religion. The forum membership is diverse including professionals, academics, clergy, and interested lay people and each year it holds a conference to encourage discussion and exploration of issues that arise at the interface of science and religion. This article provides an overview of the online conference that took place in May 2021 and introduces this thematic section that includes six articles from the conference.
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  49. On Becoming a Rooster: Zhuangzian Conventionalism and the Survival of Death.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2022 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 21 (1):61-79.
    The Zhuangzi 莊子 depicts persons as surviving their deaths through the natural transformations of the world into very different forms—such as roosters, cart-wheels, rat livers, and so on. It is common to interpret these passages metaphorically. In this essay, however, I suggest employing a “Conventionalist” view of persons that says whether a person survives some event is not merely determined by the world, but is partly determined by our own attitudes. On this reading, Zhuangzi’s many teachings urging us to embrace (...)
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  50. Sometimes I Am Fictional: Narrative and Identification.Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera - 2022 - Philosophical Papers 51 (3):403-425.
    Most analytical philosophers consider that we cannot identify with fictional characters in a literal sense. Specifically, Carroll and Gaut argue that doing so would imply a high degree of irrationality. In this paper I stand for the claim that we can identify with fictional characters thanks to a suspension of disbelief. First, I rely on narrative theories of personal identity to propose a model of how the process of identification might happen in real life. Then, I explain how this model (...)
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