R. G. Swinburne; XIII*—Personal Identity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 231–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

EMPIRICIST THEORIES OF PERSONAL IDENTITY STATE THAT THE IDENTITY OF A PERSON OVER TIME IS A MATTER OF BODILY CONTINUITY AND/OR SIMILARITY OF MEMORY AND CHARACTER. IN CONTRAST, THIS PAPER ARGUES THAT WHILE BODILY CONTINUITY AND SIMILARITY OF MEMORY AND CHARACTER ARE EVIDENCE OF PERSONAL IDENTITY, THEY DO NOT CONSTITUTE IT. IT IS SOMETHING UNDEFINABLE. THE DIFFICULTY OF KNOWING WHAT TO SAY IN PUZZLE CASES DOES NOT SHOW THAT PERSONAL IDENTITY EXISTS IN DIFFERENT DEGREES OR THAT WE HAVE TO MAKE (...) ARBITRARY JUDGMENTS ABOUT IT. IT SHOWS ONLY THAT SOMETIMES WE CANNOT KNOW WHO IS WHO. (shrink)

Life may turn sour and, in extremis, not worth living. On occasion it may be best, moreover, to lay down one's life for a greater cause. None of this is any news, debatable though it may remain, in general or case by case. Now comes the news that life does not matter in the way we had thought. No resurgence of existentialism, nor tidings from some ancient religion or some new cult, the news derives from the most sober and probing (...) philosophical argument (the extraor- dinary Parfit, 1984, Part III), and takes more precisely the following form: Even though life L is optimal (in all dimensions), and even though if it were extended L would continue to be optimal, it does not follow that it is best to extend it, even for the subject whose life L is. What is the argument? Section II will defend a certain view of the nature of persons and personal identity, and Section III will then argue for the Paradox on that basis, and reflect on its philosophical implications and on the options it presents. (shrink)

There has been considerable optimism recently, among philosophers and neuroscientists, concerning the prospect for major discoveries about the neurophysiological basis of mind. The support for this optimism has been extremely abstract and general. I wish to present some grounds ..

Like many others interested in Derek Parfit’s work, I’ve been awaiting this collection of original essays on Reasons and Persons, having placed an order with my bookstore at least a year before the book was finally published. The delay was due to the editor’s original plan of including Parfit’s responses, a plan that had to be abandoned. Eventually, Jonathan Dancy tells us, Parfit will publish responses to these pieces. And at least one response has already appeared in print, Parfit’s discussion (...) of Mark Johnston’s contribution to the—then forthcoming—Dancy volume. So the bad news is that all of these essays were in their completed form five or six years before the book was published; as a result, the arguments sometimes seem a little bit familiar and, of course, neither profit from nor engage the most recent literature on the topics they address. (shrink)

It has been argued that 'brain bisection' data leads us to abandon our traditional conception of personal identity. Nagel has remarked: The ultimate account of the unity of what we call a single mind consists of an enumeration of the types of functional integration that typify it. We know that these can be eroded in different ways and to different degrees. The belief that even in their complete version they can be explained by the presence of a numerically single subject (...) is an i1lusion.l Parfit has adopted a similar position, contending that patients with 'split brains' become two separate 'streams of consciousness' and thus that our normal sense of personal identity, or at least 'what matters' about personal identity is constituted by psychological relations between connected conscious experiences2 It is claimed that in 'split brain' patients certain of the relations are disrupted and that we thus see clearly that the nature of the unity that is normally present does not reside in a single subject with a given identity, but in the connectedness and continuity that normally obtains. Parfit draws on two sources of support for these contentions: the first is the actual events that transpire after a human being is submitted to the operation of sectioning the corpus callosum (or 'brain bisection'), and the second is the imaginative consideration of various scenarios involving graded mental and physical discontinuity, and the 'fission' and 'fusion' of persons. I shall do little more than argue that the actual data will not sustain the interpretation put on them. (shrink)

That no member of a natural kind can switch kinds is a consequence of David Wiggins’ view that the identity conditions for such things are given by the natural kind itself. If dog is a natural kind, then dogs must be dogs and one dog cannot ‘turn into’ something else, say, by gradually ‘becoming’ a mass of tissue (as Marjorie Price had held). Were such a transition to involve the persistence of the same thing, then the thing in question would (...) comply with conditions of identity not restricted to dogs. To provide for such transitions James Baillie suggests alternative conditions of identity, based on Andrew Brennan’s notion of ‘survival’ (itself borrowed from Parfit). Survival requires that the earlier thing be ‘structurally similar to’, and ‘play a significant and direct role in the production of’ the later thing (sufficiency is gained if, in addition, they are composed of the same kind of matter). Unlike identity, however, survival is what Wiggins calls a ‘branching’ relation, capable of linking a single thing with two or more equal ‘competitors’ (as apparently happens in cases of brain fission). To provide conditions of identity per se, Baillie follows Parfit, who claimed that our identity is preserved by psychological continuity when there is no branching. Members of natural kinds, such as dogs, are now said to be reidentifiable over time by the relation of non-branching survival. I argue against this on the ground that we can know when this relation obtains only when we are already able to individuate things by a different sort of relation, such as those associated with natural kinds. (shrink)

Parfit's most controversial claim about personal identity is that personal identity does not matter in the way we uncritically think it does) I would like to analyze Parfit's reasons for making this claim. These reasons are complex, and they stand in some tension with one another. I would like to examine them carefully and to try to arrive at the strongest case that can be made for Parfit's controversial claim about what matters.

I examine Derek Parfit’s claim that it doesn’t matter whether he survives in the future, if someone survives who is psychologically connected to him by “Relation R.” Thus, were his body to perish and be replaced by an exact duplicate, both physically and psychologically identical to him, this would be just as good as “ordinary” survival. Parfit takes the corollary view that replacement of loved ones by exact duplicates is no loss. In contrast, Peter Unger argues that we place nontransferable (...) value in the lives of individualpersons. I argue that the question of the preferability of Relation R over identity is unanswerable at present, as such hypothetical situations are too far removed from our experience to allow any reliable responses. I contrast cases involving artifacts, where we can make informed judgments concerning whether a given object’s value would be transferred to a duplicate. (shrink)

This paper challenges the widely held theory that split-brain patients have ‘two-minds’ and can thus be described as being two distinct persons. A distinction is made between the singularity of mind and the coherence of mind. It is stressed that ‘a single mind’ is not something posited to explain coherence among mental contents, but is merely a mark that such coherence holds to a certain degree. However, there is no sharp dividing line regarding what counts as a single mind. It (...) is argued that mental coherence is always a matter of degree, and that our concept of a single mind can accomodate spit-brain phenomena. (shrink)

IN REASONS AND PERSONS, Derek Parfit defends a conception of the self or person which he labels "Reductionist." It is a conception which owes much to Hume's view of the self as a bundle of causally connected perceptions. Indeed, Parfit's account might be thought of as capturing the best insights of the bundle theory, while avoiding many of the objections to which cruder versions of that theory appear to be liable. Parfit's preliminary characterization of Reductionism is in connection with the (...) notion of personal identity. A Reductionist view of personal identity holds that: the fact of a person's identity over time just consists in the holding of certain more particular facts, and these facts can be described without either presupposing the identity of this person, or explicitly claiming that this person exists. These facts can be described in an impersonal way. (shrink)