In this paper, I first consider a famous objection that the standard interpretation of the Lockean account of diachronicity (i.e., one’s sense of personal identity over time) via psychological connectedness falls prey to breaks in one’s personal narrative. I argue that recent case studies show that while this critique may hold with regard to some long-term autobiographical self-knowledge (e.g., episodic memory), it carries less warrant with respect to accounts based on trait-relevant, semantic self-knowledge. The second issue I (...) address concerns the question of diachronicity from the vantage point that there are (at least) two aspects of self—the self of psychophysical instantiation (what I term the epistemological self) and the self of first person subjectivity (what I term the ontological self; for discussion, see Klein SB, The self and its brain, Social Cognition, 30, 474–518, 2012). Each is held to be a necessary component of selfhood, and, in interaction, they are appear jointly sufficient for a synchronic sense of self (Klein SB, The self and its brain, Social Cognition, 30, 474–518, 2012). As pertains to diachronicity, by contrast, I contend that while the epistemological self, by itself, is precariously situated to do the work required by a coherent theory of personal identity across time, the ontological self may be better positioned to take up the challenge. (shrink)

This Dissertation argues for a care-centrically grounded account of relational personhood and widely realized diachronic personal identity. The moral distinction between persons and non-persons is arguably one of the most salient ethical lines we can draw since many of our most fundamental rights are delineated via the bounds of personhood. The problem with drawing such morally salient lines is that the orthodox, rationalistic definition of personhood, which is widespread within philosophical, medical, and colloquial spheres, excludes, and thereby (...) de-personifies, a large number and a great variety of human beings such as neonates, young children, the elderly who suffer from dementia, individuals with severe cognitive disabilities, and patients in vegetative states. The reconceptualization of personhood necessary for a more inclusive definition ought to originate with an appropriate moral grounding. To this end, this Dissertation grounds the notion of personhood in the care ethical sphere, thereby emphasizing the role of care relations in the maintenance of the moral consideration of vulnerable individuals. This Dissertation argues that grounding the concept of a person in care relations entails a relational account of personhood, which, along with the insights of the Extended Mind and Social Manifestation Theses, leads to an extended and externalized understanding of diachronic identity, which allows fragile people to be held in their personal identities even if they themselves lack the capacities usually associated with moral personhood. As we trace a person’s identity through time, we track the various relational properties, which constitute personal narratives and thus act as a glue that binds such dynamic and often unique properties into stable, trackable narratives. Since care relations are morally relevant on a care-centric account of personhood, what is lost in cases where such care relating ceases is not merely of sentimental value, but of great moral importance as well. Morally meaningful care relations are not replaceable, and, by extension, neither are the narratives that are constituted by such unique and irreplaceable instances of relating. This Dissertation argues that the constitutive care relational nature of personal narratives makes such narratives irreplaceable and is precisely what makes persons so morally precious. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of episodic memory, and the broader notion of “mental time travel” (MTT), in constituting personal identity. After arguing that the construal of memory’s role in personal identity found in traditional psychological continuity theories of personal identity is both unrealistic and unsatisfying, the paper endeavors to provide a better account. This begins with recent work in the science and philosophy of memory that sees episodic memory as part of a broader (...) faculty for MTT (which also involves imagination and counterfactual thought). Some of the basic ideas expressed in this work are developed into an account of the connection between MTT with “strong identification” and personal identity. According to this alternative approach, we regularly “borrow affect” from our pasts and futures through forms of remembering, imagining, and counterfactual thinking that involve a particular form of identification with our past and future selves. This activity generates a strong diachronic experience of self, which contributes in important ways to diachronic personal identity. The sense of self generated through MTT is, however, only one piece of a more comprehensive account of personal identity. The paper concludes by describing its place in the larger picture. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s (...) class='Hi'>diachronic self. To develop this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires (...) that a structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

The paper presents considerations that weigh against one or another version of the psychological continuity theory of personal identity over time. Such Locke-like theories frequently go wrong, it is argued, in not formulating precisely how the psychological states of an individual person are related diachronically, in failing to capture a truly appropriate causal connection between later and earlier psychological states, and in claiming support from particular cases. In addition, the paper offers examples and other considerations that support an (...) alternative, biological continuity theory according to which you and I are each identical with a human organism. (shrink)

My aim is to propose affectivity as a criterion for personal identity. My proposal is to be taken in its weak version: affectivity as _only one_ of the criteria for personal identity. I start by arguing for affectivity being a better candidate as a criterion for personal identity than thinking. Next, I focus on synchronic vs. diachronic and on ontic vs. epistemic distinctions (my proposal will concern diachronic ontic personal identity) (...) and consider the realm of affectivity in its temporal dimension. In my argument, I rely on the genuineness of affectivity and I exploit chiefly long- or everlasting feelings (or emotions) and those which involve the feeling subject more rather than less. I conclude by stating that genuine long-lasting feelings (or emotions) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity. (shrink)

Compatibilists disagree over whether there are historical conditions on moral responsibility. Historicists claim there are, whilst structuralists deny this. Historicists motivate their position by claiming to avoid the counter-intuitive implications of structuralism. I do two things in this paper. First, I argue that historicism has just as counter-intuitive implications as structuralism when faced with thought experiments inspired by those found in the personal identity literature. Hence, historicism is not automatically preferable to structuralism. Second, I argue that structuralism is (...) much more plausible once we accept that personal identity is irrelevant to moral responsibility. This paves the way for a new structuralist account that makes clear what it takes to be the diachronic ownership condition (which is normally taken to be personal identity) and the locus of moral responsibility (which is normally taken to be ‘whole’ person), and helps to alleviate the intuitive unease many have with respect to structuralism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-SelfCarl OlsonBeyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self. By Gereon Kopf. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001. 298 + xx pp.This work of comparative philosophy focuses on the problem of the self by comparing Western existential and phenomenological thought with Zen thinkers such as Dōgen and Nishida. In addition to such thinkers as (...) Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, the author also includes a discussion of such Western philosophers as Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Lock, and Hume. The author demonstrates a knowledgeable command of his subjects and the central focus of the book.After discussing the problem of personal identity in the first part of the book, the author uses the second part of the book to place phenomenologists into dialogue with Zen Buddhist thinkers. The second part of the book includes the following topics: selfhood, otherness, continuity of experience, and temporality. In the final part of the book, the author considers the Zen conception of personal identity by discussing a Zen phenomenology of experience and personhood as presencing. Within the context of this final part of the book, Kopf wants to develop terminology that derives from both phenomenology and Zen Buddhism in order to consider the Zen notion of no-self as a process of presencing. This approach gives the author an opportunity to explore the philosophical implications of Zen Buddhist terminology and rhetoric and to suggest a way to theorize and discuss the self beyond personal [End Page 200] identity. Overall, each of the three parts of the book provides a different perspective: a discourse on personal identity, a comparative philosophical perspective, and a Zen viewpoint.This work of comparative philosophy embodies an internal tension between the position of the author and the impermanent nature of the non-self in Zen Buddhism. Kopf acknowledges his basic position in the following way: "It is my thesis that the framing of the question of personal identity already implies the notion of an enduring self" (p. xviii). In contrast, Dōgen rejects the notion of an enduring self or personal identity. The author's stated thesis and that of Zen Buddhism suggests that continuity is a crucial issue for this book.In chapter 4, Kopf elucidates his understanding of the continuity of experience: "The notion of continuity reflects the assumption that the 'I' of human experience is not without a history: It finds itself in the context of past experiences, which the experiental 'I' encounters in memories, as well as in a given situation" (p. 124). In short, a person finds oneself thrown into a situation. After discussing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the non-self doctrine in early Buddhism, how the Mahāyāna thinker Vasubandhu attributes continuity of experience to the habit energy produced by karmic activity, and how Nāgārjuna collapses the distinction between sam.sāra and nirvan.a, the author considers the positions of Dōgen and Nishida. The former defines the continuity of experience by two diachronically diverse dharma positions instead of three moments of time. This position suggests that Dōgen views continuity as the process from the present to the present and not as a process that operates from the past into the future. According to Nishida, the I-Thou forms a nonrelative contradictory self-identity, and it exists in the world of expression. This implies that the self is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous.In his chapter on temporality, Kopf distinguishes between abstract time, phenomenal time, lived time, and actual time, which is a fourth dimension suggested by Dōgen and Nishida. Abstract time is rejected because time is inseparable from existence. Grasping time as a dynamic event, the author discusses phenomenal time, in which the self realizes its own temporality and historicity. In contrast to the threefold structure of abstract time, phenomenal time possesses a twofold structure of past and future, whereas lived time embodies an internal unity in which the present unifies the past and future. A fourth dimension of time—actual time—is suggested by the work of Dōgen and Nishida. Actual time expresses a "modality of... (shrink)

The publication of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons in 1984 revived and reshaped the debate on personal identity in Western philosophy. Not only does Parfit argue forcefully and ingeniously for a revisionary Reductionist theory of persons and their diachronic identity, but he also draws radical normative inferences from such a theory. Along the way he also mentions Indian Buddhist parallels to his own Reductionist theory. Some of these parallels are explored here, while particular attention is also (...) paid to the supposed normative implications of Reductionism. (shrink)

The problem of diachronic personal identity is this: what explains why a person P1 at time T1 is numerically identical with a person P2 at a later time T2, even if they are not at those times qualitatively identical? One traditional explanation is the soul theory, according to which persons persist in virtue of their nonphysical souls. I argue here that this view faces a new and arguably insuperable dilemma: either souls, like physical bodies, change over time, (...) in which case the soul theory faces an analogue problem of diachronic soul identity, or souls, unlike physical bodies, do not change over time, in which case the soul theory cannot explain why souls relate to particular bodies over time and so at best only partially explains personal identity. I conclude that the soul theory fares no better than physicalist-friendly accounts of personal identity such as bodily- or psychological-continuity-based views. (shrink)

The idea that a sense of oneself as continuing over time is necessary for the ethical and experiential depth characteristic of a human life has been expressed frequently in philosophical work on the self and other venues. The opposing view, that preoccupation with one's diachronic extension is misleading and self-damaging, has also had forceful proponents. This paper explores this conflict via reflection on Galen Strawson's defence of the value of 'Episodic' selfexperience and an objection to Strawson raised by Kathleen (...) Wilkes. I argue that, while there are legitimate worries about superficiality with respect to the Episodic self, Strawson also offers powerful reasons to think that standard understandings of the kind of diachronic selfexperience required for an ethically and experientially full human life are too strong. Employing some structural features of narrative thought, the paper develops an account of the kind of experience of self-in-time that characterizes human self-experience that is stronger than Strawson's Episodic self but accommodates his legitimate complaints against stronger forms of Diachronic self-experience. (shrink)

'identity' includes a family of relations and is wrongly restricted to what satisfies leibniz's law: diachronic and strict identity are related since the criteria of the former are just the criteria of continuity of stages of the strictly identical continuant. A general account can be given in terms of the preservation of a weighted preponderance of properties of the stages. Puzzle cases arise because of contextual shifts in the weightings assigned; in the case of persons this is (...) particularly clear because of change of emphasis between mental and physical, Both of which classes of predicate are applicable. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of personal identity was philosophically groundbreaking for its attempt to establish a non-substantial identity condition. Locke states, “For the same consciousness being preserv’d, whether in the same or different Substances, the personal Identity is preserv’d” (II.xxvii.13). Many have interpreted Locke to think that consciousness identifies a self both synchronically and diachronically by attributing thoughts and actions to a self. Thus, many have attributed to Locke either a memory theory or an appropriation theory of (...) personal identity. But the former stumble on circularity and the latter is insufficient for Locke’s moral theory insofar as he is committed to a theory of divine rectification. The common problem is that Locke’s theory seems to demand an objective, or metaphysical, fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to a traditional notion of substance for the continuity. I’m suggesting something new. In II.xxvii of the Essay, we see an ambiguity in Locke’s use of the term ‘consciousness’. Locke seems to see consciousness as both a mental state by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving and as the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states. First, I make the textual argument why we should read Locke as having a conception of a metaphysical fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to thinking or bodily substance to establish its continuity. I then argue that the metaphysical fact of an enduring consciousness is revealed to us as a phenomenological fact of experience. Due to the nature of certain kinds of perceptual situations we have an experience of ourselves as temporally extended. Although the text bears out that Locke seemed to think there is a fact of an ongoing consciousness, I argue that it is consistent with his reluctance elsewhere that he makes no further epistemological or ontological claims about it. Finally, I provide an account of Locke’s understanding of memory and its relation to consciousness that supports the claim that consciousness is something ontologically distinct from either thinking or bodily substance. (shrink)

In philosophy, the criteria for personhood (PH) at a specific point in time (synchronic), and the necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity (PI) over time (diachronic) are traditionally separated. Hence, the transition between both timescales of a person's life remains largely unclear. Personal habits reflect a decision-making (DM) process that binds together synchronic and diachronic timescales. Despite the fact that the actualization of habits takes place synchronically, they presuppose, for the possibility of their generation, (...) time in a diachronic sense. The acquisition of habits therefore rests upon PI over time; that is, the temporal extension of personal decisions is the necessary condition for the possible development of habits. Conceptually, habits can thus be seen as a bridge between synchronic and diachronic timescales of a person's life. In order to investigate the empirical mediation of this temporal linkage, we draw upon the neuronal mechanisms underlying DM; in particular on the distinction between internally and externally guided DM. Externally guided DM relies on external criteria at a specific point in time (synchronic); on a neural level, this has been associated with lateral frontal and parietal brain regions. In contrast, internally guided DM is based on the person's own preferences that involve a more longitudinal and thus diachronic timescale, which has been associated with the brain's intrinsic activity. Habits can be considered to reflect a balance between internally and externally guided DM, which implicates a particular temporal balance between diachronic and synchronic elements, thus linking two different timescales. Based on such evidence, we suggest a habit-based neurophilosophical approach of PH and PI by focusing on the empirically-based linkage between the synchronic and diachronic elements of habits. By doing so, we propose to link together what philosophically has been described and analyzed separately as PH and PI. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend an answer to the following question in the diachronic personal identity debate: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for our persistence over time? Two popular approaches to answering this question are the psychological and the somatic approach. On the former approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of psychological continuity. So, some proponents of the psychological approach think that we cease to exist if we lose certain features of our psychology (...) such as our memories, beliefs, and rationality. On the latter approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of physical continuity. Eric Olson defends a version of the somatic approach called animalism. On his view, we are numerically identical to biological organisms and we persist if and only if the organisms we are persist. Although Olson’s animalism has some benefits, it also faces some challenges. For example, many people would say that we go wherever our brains go (if we go anywhere at all) because our brains (more specifically, our cerebra) realize the aspects of our psychology traditionally associated with persons, such as memories, beliefs, rationality, and self-awareness. But on Olson’s animalism, our psychology has nothing to do with our persistence and we go wherever our bodies go rather than our cerebra. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, I lay out an animalist view of our persistence called hylomorphic animalism. On this view, we are numerically identical to rational animals, which are living bodies composed of prime matter and a rational soul. Furthermore, we persist if and only if the composite of matter and rational soul persists. I claim that hylomorphic animalism makes better sense of certain contemporary personal identity thought experiments than Olson’s animalism. For example, contra Olson, I argue that our psychology does have something to do with our persistence and that we go wherever our brains go. (shrink)

Personal indexicals are often taken to refer to the agent of an expression’s context, but deviant uses (e.g. ‘I’m parked out back’) complicate matters. I argue that personal indexicals refer to the extended self of the agent, where the extended self is a mereological chimera incorporating whatever determines our behavioral capacities. To ascertain the persistence conditions of personal identity, I propose a method for selecting a level of description and a set of functional properties at that (...) level that remain constant over a lifetime. I argue for functional constancy, and against continuity, as the central determinant of diachronic identity. (shrink)

The Naked Self explores Søren Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living (...) and recent philosophers of identity, Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant--if challenging--contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to introduce, interpret, and develop two incompatible process -ontological theories of personal identity that have received little attention in analytic metaphysics. The first theory derives from the notion of personal identity proposed in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, but I interpret this notion differently from previous commentators. The Whiteheadian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but has (...) nothing to do with diachronic objectual identity : the binary equivalence relation that every entity bears to itself, and only to itself, even after undergoing intrinsic change. The Whiteheadian theory may also find favor with those who, like Whitehead, reject the possibility of pure processes and hold that in every becoming, something—which need not be an object, thing, or individual substance—becomes. The second theory derives from the notion of recurrent dynamics presented in Johanna Seibt’s General Process Theory. The Seibtian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves not only an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but also the relation of diachronic objectual identity. The Seibtian theory may also find favor with those who, like Broad and Sellars, find reason to postulate pure processes. (shrink)

What is the difference between the complex view of personal identity over time and the simple view? Traditionally, the defenders of the complex view are said to include Locke and Hume, defenders of the simple view to include Butler and Reid. In our own time it is standard to think of Chisholm and Swinburne as defenders of the simple view and Shoemaker, Parfit, Williams and Lewis as defenders of the complex view. But how exactly is the distinction to (...) be characterized? One difference between the two camps is that defenders of the simple view emphasize the difference between diachronic personal identity and the identity of other objects; they insist that in the case of the other familiar types that figure in philosophical puzzle cases about identity – ships, statues, plants and so on – the correct view is the complex one. On the other hand, defenders of the complex view do not hold a simple view of other things; rather they think that the complex view is correct across the board. We therefore need an account of the distinction which allows us to speak generally of ‘the complex/simple view of the diachronic identity of things of sort S’ where ‘S’ is a sortal term. A respectable view about problems of identity in general is that there aren’t any: any genuine philosophical puzzles can be rephrased so that the language of identity drops out . In what follows, I offer an account of the simple/complex contrast which conforms to this Lewisean view. 1 We can begin by distinguishing two types of constraint on personhood. Type , or synchronic constraints, are capturable in the form: If x is a person, then if x exists at t, Fxt where ‘ F represents a term for a non-historical property, a property …. (shrink)

What is the difference between the complex view of personal identity over time and the simple view? Traditionally, the defenders of the complex view are said to include Locke and Hume, defenders of the simple view to include Butler and Reid. In our own time it is standard to think of Chisholm and Swinburne as defenders of the simple view and Shoemaker, Parfit, Williams and Lewis as defenders of the complex view. But how exactly is the distinction to (...) be characterized? One difference between the two camps is that defenders of the simple view emphasize the difference between diachronic personal identity and the identity of other objects; they insist that in the case of the other familiar types that figure in philosophical puzzle cases about identity – ships, statues, plants and so on – the correct view is the complex one. On the other hand, defenders of the complex view do not hold a simple view of other things; rather they think that the complex view is correct across the board. We therefore need an account of the distinction which allows us to speak generally of ‘the complex/simple view of the diachronic identity of things of sort S’ where ‘S’ is a sortal term. A respectable view about problems of identity in general is that there aren’t any: any genuine philosophical puzzles can be rephrased so that the language of identity drops out. In what follows, I offer an account of the simple/complex contrast which conforms to this Lewisean view. 1 We can begin by distinguishing two types of constraint on personhood. Type, or synchronic constraints, are capturable in the form: If x is a person, then if x exists at t, Fxt where ‘ F represents a term for a non-historical property, a property …. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker’s Constitution View of human persons has come under much recent scrutiny. Baker argues that each human person is constituted by, but not identical to, a human animal. Much of the critical discussion of Baker’s Constitution View has focused upon this aspect of her account. Less has been said about the positive diachronic account of personal identity offered by Baker. Baker argues that it is sameness of what she labels ‘first-person perspective’ that is essential to (...) understanding personal identity over time . Baker claims that her account avoids the commitment to indeterminacy of personal identity entailed by the psychological account. Further, the psychological account, but not her account, is plagued by what Baker labels the ‘duplication problem’. In the end, I argue that neither of these considerations forces us to renounce the psychological account and adopt Baker’s favored account. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker leads today’s “neo-Lockean” liberation of persons from the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson, according to whom persons are biological entities and who challenge all neo-Lockean views on grounds that abstracting from strictly physical, or bodily, criteria plays fast and loose with our identities. There is a fundamental mistake on both sides: a false dichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychological continuity theories of personal identity. Neo-Lockeans, like everyone else today who relies on Locke’s (...) analysis of personal identity, including Derek Parfit, have either completely distorted or not understood Locke’s actual view. Shoemaker’s defense, which uses a “package deal” definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity and employs the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity, leaves far less room for psychological continuity views than for my own view, which, independently of its radical implications, is that (a) consciousness makes personal identity, and (b) in consciousness alone personal identity consists—which happens to be also Locke’s actual view. Moreover, the ubiquitous Fregean conception of borders and the so-called “ambiguity of is” collapse in the light of what Hintikka has called the “Frege trichotomy.” The Ramsey–Lewis account, due to the problematic way Shoemaker tries to bind the variables, makes it impossible for the neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfill the uniqueness clause required by all such Lewis style definitions; such attempts avoid circularity only at the expense of mistaking isomorphism with identity. Contrary to what virtually all philosophers writing on the topic assume, fission does not destroy personal identity. A proper analysis of public versus perspectival identification, derived using actual case studies from neuropsychiatry, provides the scientific, mathematical and logical frameworks for a new theory of self-reference, wherein “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” and the “I,” can be precisely defined in terms of the subject and the subject-in-itself. (shrink)

Although the contributions of John Locke's memory-theory and David Hume's bundle-theory to the construction of the contemporary empiricist theory of personal identity are explicitly acknowledged, empiricist philosophers relatively neglect another important source of inspiration in their debate on personal identity in analytical philosophy, namely Bertrand Russell's philosophy of logical atomism. However, Derek Parfit's radically empiricist and impersonal view on personal identity implicitly is a direct heir of Russell's view on personal identity. In (...) this article, I try to make explicit the Russellian heritage in the contemporary empiricist theory of personal identity by reconstructing Russell's view on the existence and the nature of the 'I' and the identity of the self. For the purpose of explaining Russell's view that 'I' really is the abbreviation for the description 'the subject of the present experience' or 'the subject of «this»', the technical concepts of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description as well as the notion of a proper name in the logical sense are introduced. And, in order to explain Russell's view on self-identity as constituted by the synchronic relation of 'compresence' and the diachronic R-relation of 'co-personality', the technique of logical construction is appealed to. (shrink)

Our ability to tell stories about ourselves has captivated many theorists, and some have taken these developments for an opportunity to answer long-standing questions about the nature of personhood. In this essay I employ two skeptical arguments to show that this move was a mistake. The first argument rests on the observation that storytelling is revisionary. The second implies that our stories about ourselves are biased in regard to our existing self-image. These arguments undercut narrative theories of identity, but (...) they leave room for a theory of narrative self-knowledge. The theory accommodates the first skeptical argument because there are event descriptions with retrospective assertibility conditions, and it accommodates the second argument by denying us epistemic privilege in regard to our own past. The result is that we do know our past through storytelling, but that it is a contingent feature of some of our stories that they are about ourselves. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to derive a perfectly general criterion of identity through time from Locke’s Principle, which says that two things of the same kind cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In this way, the paper pursues a suggestion made by Peter F. Strawson almost thirty years ago in an article called ‘Entity and Identity’. The reason why the potential of this suggestion has so far remained unrealized is twofold: firstly, the suggestion (...) was never properly developed by Strawson, and secondly, it seemed vulnerable to an objection that he himself raised against it. Consequently, the paper’s aim is to further develop Strawson’s suggestion, and to show that the result is not vulnerable to the objection that seemed fatal to its underdeveloped predecessor. In addition, the paper aims to defend Locke’s Principle against alleged counterexamples such as those produced by Leibniz, Fine and Hughes. (shrink)

Substantive theories of diachronic identity have been offered for different kinds of entities. The kind of entity whose diachronic identity has received the most attention in the literature is person, where such theories as the psychological theory, the body theory, the soul theory, and animalism have been defended. At the same time, Wittgenstein's remark that ?to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with (...) itself is to say nothing at all? suggests that the idea of further analysing identity is mistaken at root. I shall offer a simple, deflationary theory that reduces diachronic identity to quantification, synchronic identity and existence at a spacetime location (or at a time, for non-spatial entities). On logical grounds, the theory is guaranteed to have no counterexamples. Because the theory is guaranteed to have no counterexamples, all the imaginative examples offered as intuitive support for theories of personal identity are going to be either incorrect or compatible with the theory. I shall argue that the deflationary theory is preferable on simplicity grounds to typical substantive theories, and that various problems that are commonly thought to concern diachronic identity are better seen as about something else. (shrink)

This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe (...) as changes in one’s de se beliefs. To solve this problem, the paper defends the possibility of overlapping people, and addresses a number of objections to this idea. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between synchronic responsibility (SR) and diachronic responsibility (DR). SR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at the time of the action, while DR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at some later time. While most theorists implicitly assume that DR is a straightforward matter of personal identity, I argue instead that it is grounded in psychological connectedness. I discuss the implications this distinction has for the concepts of apology, forgiveness, and punishment as (...) well as the way in which this distinction can be used to defend quality of will accounts of responsibility against objections involving psychological manipulation. I argue that the intuition that a manipulated agent is not responsible can be explained by appeal to the conditions of DR and, as such, does not unproblematically shed light on the conditions of SR. (shrink)

Was bedeutet es, über die Dauer des Lebens als individuelle Person fortzubestehen? Wagner entwickelt eine Theorie, die Personen als psycho-physische Akteure auffasst, deren Identität durch die kontingenten faktischen Normen und Strukturen der Handlungswelt bestimmt wird. Personenidentität wird als graduierbare Relation verstanden, die unsere Existenz auf einem Kontinuum zwischen Menschsein und Personsein lokalisiert.

After an exposition of the importance of the concept of diachronic identity and a short sketch of the bewildering confusion concerning the meaning of the terms intimately connected to it, an outline of the basic features of Whitehead’s process approach is presented in as far as it is relevant for the topic of the human person and identity. In a further step, Whitehead’s concept of ‘person’ as nested in this approach will be discussed and the dilemma between (...) securing human identity on the one side and accounting at the same time for its flexible adaptivity to the environment on the other, will be elaborated. Then the concepts of strict and partial identity and the problem of the fragility of human identity, and even its possible loss, and how identity can be secured within this processorganismic conception of ‘person’ will be dealt with. Finally, the sources of partial diachronic identity within the framework of process philosophy will be discussed. (shrink)

The debate on personal persistence has been characterized by a dichotomy which is due to its still Cartesian framwork: On the one side we find proponents of psychological continuity who connect, in Locke’s tradition, the persistence of the person with the constancy of the first-person perspective in retrospection. On the other side, proponents of a biological approach take diachronic identity to consist in the continuity of the organism as the carrier of personal existence from a third-person-perspective. (...) Thus, what accounts for someone’s persistence over time, is the continuity of his mind on the one hand, and the continuity of his body on the other. In contrast to those views, the paper intends to show that bodily existence represents the basis of selfhood across time, both as the continuity of the experiential self and as the continuity of the autopoietic organism. On the one hand, the lived body conveys a continuity of the self from a first-person perspective, namely a pre-reflective feeling of sameness or a felt constancy of subjectivity. Moreover, an analysis of awakening and sleep shows that there is a continuous transition from full wakefulness to periods of deep sleep which may thus not be regarded as a complete interruption of subjective experience. On the other hand, this constancy converges with the continuity of the organismic life process as conceived from a third-person perspective. Thus, the experiential self of bodily subjectivity and the autopoietic self of the living organism should be regarded as two aspects of one and the same life process. Finally, the lived body also exhibits a specific form of memory that results from the continual embodiment of existence: it consists of all the affinities, capacities and experiences, which a person has acquired throughout his life. Thus, it provides a continuity of self that must not be actively produced through remembering, but rather integrates the person’s entire past in his present being and potentiality. (shrink)

I don’t think Lynne Rudder Baker’s constitution view can account for personal identity problems of a synchronic or diachronic nature. As such, it cannot accommodate the Christian’s claim of eschatological bodily resurrection-a principle reason for which she gives this account. In light of this, I press objections against her constitution view in the following ways: First, I critique an analogy she draws between Aristotle’s “accidental sameness” and constitution. Second, I address three problems for Baker’s constitution view [‘Constitution (...) Problems’ ], each more problematic than the next: CP1: Her definition of constitution lacks explanatory power; CP2: If there is a plausible definition of constitution, constitution implies either too many persons or no human persons at all; CP3: Constitution yields no essential distinction between human and divine persons. If my argument go through, her constitution view has neither an explanation for diachronic personal identity nor personal identity through resurrection. (shrink)

Many theorists have found the notion of forgiveness to be paradoxical, for it is thought that only the blameworthy can be appropriately forgiven but that the blameworthy are appropriately blamed not forgiven. Some have appealed to the notion of repentance to resolve this tension. But others have objected that such a response is explanatorily inadequate in the sense that it merely stipulates and names a solution leaving the transformative power of repentance unexplained. Worse still, others have objected that such a (...) response cannot succeed because no amount of repentance can render the blameworthy not blameworthy. I argue that this latter objection is based on a mistaken assumption, the acknowledgement of which has the power to resolve the paradox in a way that meets the explanatory adequacy challenge, and, more generally, has significant implications with which any full theory of forgiveness must engage. (shrink)

According to Locke, scripture says nothing about the resurrection of the same body. We will be resurrected. But in what sense can resurrected Jane be the “same” as living Jane? Throughout his thinking, Locke holds that sameness of body and/or sameness of soul are not required for the resurrection of “the same Jane.” Sameness of person is required. Locke’s theory of personal identity was ground-breaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was provoking and resulted in a wave (...) of critical responses. His distinction between “man” and “person” is important for his account of personal identity, but the distinction was hard for his contemporaries to understand. The correspondence between Locke and Edward Stillingfleet, for example, shows that for Stillingfleet the distinction between “man” and “person” is artificial. Having read this correspondence, Winch Holdsworth attacks Locke in a sermon in 1719 arguing that Locke denied the resurrection altogether. Catharine Trotter Cockburn tries to defend Locke in her Vindication. Despite her clear understanding of the distinctions applied by Locke, she too struggles with what to make of a person. (shrink)

Persons care about their future selves. They reason about their future selves’ interests; they plan for their future selves’ happiness and they worry about their future selves’ suffering. This paper is interested in the interplay between diachronic prudential reason and certain accounts of the metaphysics of personal identity that fall under the broad umbrella ‘conventionalist’. Some conventionalists conclude that under certain conditions there are intractable decisions for there is no fact of the matter regarding whether a person-stage (...) ought (prudentially) to ϕ. This paper will suggest otherwise. These decisions are not intractable if we allow that it is sometimes rational for a person-stage to discount the utility of certain future person-stages. The paper then goes on to explore an alternative position that conventionalists might occupy which does not involve any such discounting: prudential relativism. According to prudential relativism it is impossible to offer a single, correct, answer to the question: should person-stage, P, ϕ at t? For according to prudential relativism there is no stage-independent stance from which to evaluate whether a person-stage ought to ϕ. Yet it is not, for all that, intractable, from P’s perspective, whether or not to ϕ. (shrink)

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same (...) time. This result undermines some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

The analysis of personal identity over time (personal persistence) in terms of properties of the first-person perspective has been neglected for quite a while. However, there seems to be an interesting relation between experiential features on the one hand and the notion of personal persistence on the other hand. This idea is famously spelled out in an argument introduced by Barry Dainton (2000; 2005; 2008), according to which diachronic personal persistence con- sists in experiential (...) continuity (stream of consciousness). This paper challenges one central claim of the argument, whose main target is to ward off the threat of factual interruptions in the stream of consciousness. It will be objected that this problem cannot be properly solved. However, the relevance of experiential features to personal persistence can be shown if one leaves behind the question of criteria of personal identity over time and instead turns to the question of what it means to have a sense of self-identity over time. It will be argued that not only experiential continuity but also experiential features of episodic memory characterise the sense of self-identity over time. (shrink)

The use of brain technology that contributes to psychological changes has spurred a debate about personal identity. Some argue that neurotechnology does not undermine personal continuity (Levy, 2011) while others argue that it does (Kreitmair, 2019; Schechtman, 2010). To make these assessments, commentators fail to identify psychological changes that cause personal discontinuity. In this paper, I present a view that identifies personal continuity with the maintenance of a self-concept. I argue that a concept of self (...) requires the ability to self-ascribe physical and psychological features and that the diachronic self emerges with self-ascriptions of features that require endurance over time. I maintain that an adequate concept of self does not depend on the maintenance of any particular combination of self-ascriptions and that it can be maintained despite even significant changes in psychological or physical traits. Finally, I apply the self-concept view to identify changes that can result in discontinuity of self. (shrink)

The article deals with the problematic aspects of the concept of identity, the analysis of which helps to point out and to overcome the paradoxes of the “diachronic identity”, the identity of the human person (as identity of its inner cell) and “plural, flexible identity”, and also to clarify the conditions of the legitimate use of these concepts in contemporary philosophy and social science. The article examines two paradigms of identity: the substantive, when (...) the identity of a thing is sought in an invariable property, which provides its synchronous identity, and the formal, when the identity is sought in a form, a structure of the language, which provides its duration in time and helps to understand the diachronic identity. The article shows the importance of the use of “criteria of identity”, introduced by analytical philosophers to find out the way of duration in time of beings which they try to identify, from the material objects to the collective beings, including the identity of the human person. The problem of subjective identity is pointed out as a separate problem. Two main approaches to it are differentiated: mentalist and expressivist. The first is focused on the inner world of the human being, its memories and feelings, creating paradoxes of the «identity for itself» which is not the «identity for the others», whereas the second lets include the social world in the definition of the subjective identity and facilitates the reconsideration of the boundaries of the internal and the external in determining the human self. The article analyses contemporary use of the concept of identity in social science and public discourses and demonstrates the contradiction of the concept of “plural, heterogeneous identity”, which formulates but doesn’t solve the problem of the subjective identity as the identification of an individual with different social groups. (shrink)

Several have denied that there is, specifically, a criterion of identity for persons and some deny that there are, for any kind, diachronic criteria of identity. I argue, however, that there are no criteria of identity, either synchronic or diachronic, for any kind whatsoever. I begin by elaborating the notion of a criterion of identity in order to clarify what exactly is being denied when I maintain there are none. I examine the motivation of (...) those who qualify in some way the general claim that there are synchronic and diachronic criteria of identity for every kind, then present my direct and categorical argument against such criteria. I next evaluate the objections of those who argue that rejecting criteria of identity has untenable results. These objections are ineffective, each based on the incorrect assumption that if there is no criterion of identity for a kind, the identity of an instance of that kind is independent of its qualities. I conclude by considering some of the upshots of rejecting criteria of identity and the insight doing so provides into things in general and the limits of ontological inquiry. (shrink)

Synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness and their in­terrelation pose interdisciplinary problems that can only be addressed by the combined means of philosophical and scien­tific theories. In the first part of the article the author briefly reviews psychological and materialistic accounts of personal identity. Historically these accounts were introduced to solve the problem of diachronic identity of persons, i.e., the problem of their persistence through time. She argues that they don’t explain how synchronic unity of (...) consciousness, subjectively experienced as the unity of the phenomenal field, correlates with diachronic identity of persons. In the second part of the article the author reviews Tim Bayne’s “virtual phenomenalism”. In the third part of the article she formulates two questions that virtual phenomenalism has to answer in order to solve the problems that face both the psychological and the materialistic accounts of personal identity. The first question concerns some cognitive and neurobiological characteristics of consciousness that Bayne invokes in order to propose an original solution of the problem of the synchronic unity of consciousness. It might be asked whether the same characteristics can undermine Bayne’s solution of the problem of the diachronic unity of consciousness. The second question is a development of Bernard Williams’ arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity. The author suggests that similar arguments can be used against virtual phenomenalism. (shrink)

The question “What makes a group of simultaneous experiences the experiences of a single person?” has been nearly ignored in the philosophical literature for the past few decades. The most common answer to this much neglected question is “Two simultaneous experiences belong to a single person if there is a common consciousness or awareness of them.” However, consciousness and awareness are difficult concepts to analyze, so that little of substance has been said of the answer. Recently, Oaklander has argued that (...) the awareness answer is deficient for a different reason, claiming that it fails because “it ultimately rests on an analysis of the unity of consciousness that is itself circular or otherwise inadequate” Oaklander 1987, p. 525). Oaklander's criticism is especially interesting because, according to it, the awareness account of synchronic personal identity falls prey to the main problem facing the memory account of diachronic identity, namely the problem of branching. In this paper, I shall argue that there is no important symmetry. Whatever its other flaws may be, the awareness account is immune to the branching problem; its immunity is due to formal differences between synchronic and diachronic identity. (shrink)

When talking about personal identity in the context of medical ethics, ethicists tend to borrow haphazardly from different philosophical notions of personal identity, or to abjure these abstract metaphysical concerns as having nothing to do with practical questions in medical ethics. In fact, however, part of the moral authority for respecting a patient’s self-regarding decisions can only be made sense of if we make certain assumptions that are central to a particular, psychological picture of personal (...) identity, namely, that patients will remain psychologically connected to a certain degree with their future selves. I draw this out, show problems with approaches in medical ethics based on alternate theories of personal identity that do not recognise this, and explore some important implications. Namely, I show how this recognition can better explain the circumstances under which we should respect advance directives and why, and how it can better make sense of patient fears that they will not "survive" personality-altering deep brain stimulation procedures, and provide guidance on approaching patient decisions concerning this type of procedure in a manner that captures and addresses such concerns. (shrink)