Abstract

In the later chapters of this essay, I attempt to set up the machinery for a reconstructed person-stage theory incorporating the suggestion that person-stage identity is a sortal-relative identity relation. To understand this relation we have to define the class of predicates for which it is an indiscernibility relation. I suggest that this class is to be defined in terms of Perry's notion of a 'basic property,' which, though intuitive, turns out to be highly problematic upon closer examination. Relative identity does not solve all the person-stage theorist's problems; indeed, it generates some new ones. ;My purpose has not been to construct a new and better person-stage theory, or to defend the relativist account of identity, but rather to show that the person-stage approach of the problem of personal identity involves serious difficulties, some of which may be decisive. ;A person-stage account of personal identity presupposes a prior understanding of person-stage identity. On Perry's account, a person-stage is a set of events: hence, I argue, the problem of person-stage identity raises the vexed question of event identity. I consider two quite different accounts of event identity, Kim's and Davidson's, and show that neither seems compatible with Perry's person-stage theory. ;I suggest that the problem is not with event identity but with identity per se. The person-stage theorist, I argue, must hold that, in some conceivable cases, individuals who differ with respect to certain properties are the same person-stage. This is, of course, incompatible with the classical or 'absolutist' account of identity. ;It has been suggested recently that many of the puzzles associated with the problem of personal identity--particularly the problem of the dividing self--can be clarified or dissolved if persons are understood as four-dimensional objects composed of momentary temporal slices or 'person-stages.' ;I argue that person-stage accounts, such as Perry's carry heavy philosophical commitments and may pose serious problems when we attempt to explicate them