Abstract

Psychological Approaches to Personal Identity maintain that the persistence of some kind of mind is essential to our survival. The Biological Approach to Personal Identity considers the mind to be metaphysically no more important to one's identity than one's kidney. Our persistence conditions are those of an organism and an organism does not need to be conscious to survive. A case is made that the BAPI is the superior account because it avoids the metaphysical quandaries that the psychological approach gives rise to. Many of these problems result from the psychological approach's commitment to the organism and the person being spatially coincident but distinct entities. One major problem is that if the person can think, so can the physically identical organism, and thus there will be two thinking beings where we would like there to be only one. It is argued that the psychological accounts of Baker and Shoemaker, which stress that the organism constitutes the person, are unable to avoid the problem of too many minds. The BAPI is also contrasted with the Body Approach to Personal Identity. If an organism is essentially a living entity, then it ceases to exist at death. But if the body continues to exist as a corpse, then before death it would appear that the body and the organism were spatially coincident and thus problems similar to those plaguing the PAPI would arise for the BAPI. An explanation of how the BAPI avoids such metaphysical quandaries is offered towards the end of the thesis