58 found
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  1. The Constitution of Selves.Marya Schechtman (ed.) - 1996 - Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
    Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second.
  2. Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life.Marya Schechtman (ed.) - 2014 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Marya Schechtman offers a new theory of personal identity, which captures the importance of being able to reidentify people in our daily lives. She sees persons as loci of practical interaction, and defines the unity of such a locus in terms of biological, psychological, and social functions, mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
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  3. The Constitution of Selves.Christopher Williams & Marya Schechtman - 1998 - Philosophical Review 107 (4):641.
    Can we understand what makes someone the same person without understanding what it is to be a person? Prereflectively we might not think so, but philosophers often accord these questions separate treatments, with personal-identity theorists claiming the first question and free-will theorists the second. Yet much of what is of interest to a person—the possibility of survival over time, compensation for past hardships, concern for future projects, or moral responsibility—is not obviously intelligible from the perspective of either question alone. Marya (...)
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  4. The narrative self.Marya Schechtman - 2011 - In Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This article examines the narrative approach to self found in philosophy and related disciplines. The strongest versions of the narrative approach hold that both a person's sense of self and a person's life are narrative in structure, and this is called the hermeneutical narrative theory. This article provides a provisional picture of the content of the narrative approach and considers some important objections that have been raised to the narrative approach. It defends the view that the self constitutes itself in (...)
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  5. Philosophical Reflections on Narrative and Deep Brain Stimulation.Marya Schechtman - 2010 - Journal of Clinical Ethics 21 (2):133-139.
    Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has in some cases been associated with significant psychological effects and/or personality change. These effects occur sometimes as acute changes experienced intraoperatively or during the initial setting of the stimulator and sometimes as longer term progressive changes in the months following surgery. Sometimes they are the intended outcome of treatment, and in other cases they are an unintended side-effect. In all of these circumstances some patients and caregivers have described the psychological effects of DBS as frightening (...)
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  6. Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View.Marya Schechtman - 2007 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60:155-178.
    Everyone loves a good story. But does everyone live a good story? It has frequently been asserted by philosophers, psychologists and others interested in understanding the distinctive nature of human existence that our lives do, or should, take a narrative form. Over the last few decades there has been a steady and growing focus on this narrative approach within philosophical discussions of personal identity, resulting in a wide range of narrative identity theories. While the narrative approach has shown great promise (...)
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  7. Empathic access: The missing ingredient in personal identity.Marya Schechtman - 2001 - Philosophical Explorations 4 (2):95 – 111.
    Philosophical discussions of personal identity depend upon thought experiments which describe psychological vicissitudes and question whether the original person survives in the person resulting from the described change. These cases are meant to determine the types of psychological change compatible with personal continuation. Two main accounts of identity try to capture this distinction; psychological continuity theories and narrative theories. I argue that neither fully succeeds since both overlook the importance of a relationship I call “empathic access.” I define empathic access (...)
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  8. Personhood and personal identity.Marya Schechtman - 1990 - Journal of Philosophy 87 (2):71-92.
  9.  61
    Self-Narrative, Literary Narrative, and Self-Understanding.Marya Schechtman - 2023 - Philosophia 52 (1):11-20.
    In the innovative and engaging _Philosophy, Literature and Understanding_, Jukka Mikkonen investigates a range of developments in multiple disciplines that have complicated traditional debates between cognitivists and non-cognitivists about literature. To avoid the extremes this debate has fallen into, Mikkonen develops a middle course that grounds the cognitive value of literature in its contributions to cultural and self-understanding. As part of this argument, Mikkonen offers an account of how literature can contribute to self-understanding via its narrative form despite what he (...)
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  10. Memory and identity.Marya Schechtman - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (1):65-79.
    Among the many topics covered in Sven Bernecker’s impressive study of memory is the relation between memory and personal identity. Bernecker uses his grammatical taxonomy of memory and causal account to defend the claim that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity and hence that circularity objections to memory-based accounts of personal identity are misplaced. In my comment I investigate these claims, suggesting that the relation between personal identity and memory is more complicated than Bernecker’s analysis suggests. In particular, I (...)
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  11. Personal identity and the past.Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 12 (1):9-22.
    In the second edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argues that personal identity over time consists in sameness of consciousness rather than the persistence of any substance, material or immaterial. Something about this view is very compelling, but as it stands it is too vague and problematic to provide a viable account of personal identity. Contemporary "psychological continuity theorists" have tried to amend Locke's view to capture his insights and avoid his difficulties. This paper argues that the (...)
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  12. Personhood and the practical.Marya Schechtman - 2010 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (4):271-283.
    Traditionally, it has been assumed that metaphysical and practical questions about personhood and personal identity are inherently linked. Neo-Lockean views that draw such a link have been problematic, leading to an opposing view that metaphysical and ethical questions about persons should be sharply distinguished. This paper argues that consideration of this issue suffers from an overly narrow conception of the practical concerns associated with persons that focuses on higher-order capacities and fails to appreciate basic practical concerns more directly connected to (...)
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  13. Self‐Expression and Self‐Control.Marya Schechtman - 2004 - Ratio 17 (4):409-427.
    It is often said that people are ‘not themselves’ when they are in situations which rob them of their self‐control. Strangely, these are also circumstances in which people are often said to be most fully themselves. This paper investigates the pictures of the self behind these two truisms, and the relation between them. Harry Frankfurt’s work represents the first truism, and standard objections to his work the second. Each of these approaches is found to capture one independent and widely employed (...)
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  14. The Story of my (Second) Life: Virtual Worlds and Narrative Identity.Marya Schechtman - 2012 - Philosophy and Technology 25 (3):329-343.
    Abstract A small but significant number of residents of Second Life (SL) insist that SL is as real to them as Real Life (RL) and that their SL avatars are as much themselves as their offscreen selves. This paper investigates whether this claim can be literally true in any philosophically interesting way. Using a narrative account of personal identity I argue that there is a way of understanding these identity claims according to which the actions and experiences of the offscreen (...)
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  15.  87
    The View from everywhere: temporal self-experience and the Good Life.Marya Schechtman - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3):445-458.
    It is a common thought that our experience of self in time plays a crucial role in living a good human life. This idea is seen both in views that say we must think of our lives as temporally extended wholes to live well and those that say living well requires living in the moment. These opposing views share the assumption that a person’s interests must be identified with either a temporally extended or temporally local perspective. David Velleman has argued (...)
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  16. Getting our stories straight : self-narrative and personal identity.Marya Schechtman - 2009 - In Debra J. H. Mathews, Hilary Bok & Peter V. Rabins (eds.), Personal identity and fractured selves: perspectives from philosophy, ethics, and neuroscience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    Identity questions might arise in dealing with someone with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who seems to exhibit several distinct personalities. They also arise in the four case studies we are asked to consider (see record 2009-18001-003). Each of these cases describes a human being who changes in such fundamental ways that it is natural to ask whether we are dealing with the same person throughout his story. These identity questions cannot be answered by learning more facts about human bodies, because (...)
     
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  17. The brain/body problem.Marya Schechtman - 1997 - Philosophical Psychology 10 (2):149 – 164.
    It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the mind is located in the brain. Although there have been some challenges to this view, it has remained mainstream outside of a few specialized discussions, and plays a prominent role in a wide variety of philosophical arguments. It is further assumed that the source of this view is empirical. I argue it is not. Empirical discoveries show conclusively that the brain is the central organ of mental life, but do not show (...)
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  18.  64
    Comment on ‘What’s special about “not feeling like oneself”?’.Marya Schechtman - 2022 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (3):290-293.
    This paper outlines a novel and exciting approach to topics of immense practical and theoretical significance. The overall strategy, offered as part of an ongoing research program, is powerful and...
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  19.  68
    Diversity in unity: practical unity and personal boundaries.Marya Schechtman - 2008 - Synthese 162 (3):405-423.
    In the spirit of the discussion in Daniel Kolak’s I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundation for Global Ethics, I consider the way in which divisions that we usually think of as borders between distinct people occur within a single life. Starting with the dispute between constructionist and non-constructionist views of persons, I argue for a view that places the unity of persons in the dynamic generated by simultaneously taking a constructionist and non-constructionist view of oneself. In order to unify ourselves (...)
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  20. Experience, agency, and personal identity.Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2):1-24.
    Psychologically based accounts of personal identity over time start from a view of persons as experiencing subjects. Derek Parfit argues that if such an account is to justify the importance we attach to identity it will need to provide a deep unity of consciousness throughout the life of a person, and no such unity is possible. In response, many philosophers have switched to a view of persons as essentially agents, arguing that the importance of identity depends upon agential unity rather (...)
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  21. Making Ourselves Whole: Wholeheartedness, Narrative, and Agency.Marya Schechtman - 2014 - Ethical Perspectives 21 (2):175-198.
    This article uncovers difficulties with a widely-held account of the kind of agential unity required for autonomous action and offers an alternative account that avoids these difficulties. One influential approach to characterizing agency holds that autonomous action occurs only when an agent is wholeheartedly committed to the motivation on which he or she acts. The basic idea behind this approach is that autonomous action is action that flows from motivations that are truly internal to the agent, and that it is (...)
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  22. Reflections on Persimals.Marya Schechtman - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):163-170.
    Steven Luper offers richly-textured arguments against the Embodied Part View developed by Jeff McMahan and offered as an answer to the “too many thinkers” problem. One of the major objections he raises is connected to McMahan's claim that the mind, and so the person, is to be identified with the part of the brain in which consciousness is directly realized. This view has the implausible consequence, Luper argues, that persons do not and cannot think or reason or have desires or (...)
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  23.  26
    Personal identity and mental time travel.Marya Schechtman - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.
    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 (...)
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  24. The same and the same: Two views of psychological continuity.Marya Schechtman - 1994 - American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (3):199-212.
  25. Personality and persistence: The many faces of personal survival.Marya Schechtman - 2004 - American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2):87-106.
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  26.  10
    Preface.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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  27. 5. The Narrative Self-Constitution View.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 93-135.
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  28. The Whole Story: Identity and Narrative.Marya Schechtman - 2022 - In Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 99-110.
    The burgeoning use of experimental methods to consider questions of human nature and personal identity has been a fruitful and exciting development, yielding significant and provocative results. This essay argues for the value of including reflection on the treatment of these topics in fictional narratives to complement and deepen results in experimental philosophy. Experimental vignettes are by necessity brief and schematic. This is part of what makes them so effective in the experimental context. The space afforded for detail, complexity, and (...)
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  29. (1 other version)The Self.Galen Strawson & Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Wiley-Blackwell.
    This collection of philosophical papers reflects on the existence and nature of the self. A collection of philosophical papers devoted to the subject of the self. Reflects on key questions about the existence and nature of the self. Comprises contributions from leading authorities in the field: Barry Dainton, Ingmar Persson, Marya Schechtman, Galen Strawson, Bas van Fraassen, and Peter van Inwagen.
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  30. Misunderstandings Understood.Marya Schechtman - forthcoming - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 20 (1):47-50.
  31. Staying Alive: Personal Continuation and a Life Worth Having.Marya Schechtman - 2007 - In Kim Atkins & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency. New York: Routledge. pp. 31--55.
  32.  49
    Making the Truth: Self-Understanding, Self-Constitution, Neuroscience, and Narrative.Marya Schechtman - 2012 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (4):75-76.
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  33.  17
    The moments of a life : on some similarities between life and literature.Marya Schechtman - 2015 - In John Lippitt & Patrick Stokes (eds.), Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 11-28.
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  34.  50
    1. Art Imitating Life Imitating Art: Literary Narrative and Autobiographical Narrative.Marya Schechtman - 2015 - In Christopher Cowley (ed.), The Philosophy of Autobiography. University of Chicago Press. pp. 22-38.
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  35.  59
    Interview by Simon Cushing.Marya Schechtman & Simon Cushing - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics (Philosophical Profiles).
    Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Marya Schechtman on 24 June 2015.
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  36.  86
    Space, Time, and Quality: A Response to ‘Narrative and Personal Identity’.Marya Schechtman - 2022 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 96 (1):227-244.
    In ‘Narrative and Personal Identity’, Mark Schroeder defends an important and exciting account of personal identity. This account starts from insights he finds in Locke and Frankfurt, but moves beyond them in ways that complicate and improve their respective notions of personhood and agency. I argue that he nonetheless retains too much from the views he rejects, especially an undue emphasis on the role of agency in personal identity and an impoverished picture of our embodiment. This paper explains the ways (...)
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  37. It's Complicated.Marya Schechtman - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (3).
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  38.  93
    The story of the mind: Psychological and biological explanations of human behavior.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - Zygon 31 (4):597-614.
    Persons have a curious dual nature. On the one hand, they are subjects, whose actions must be explained in terms of beliefs, desires, plans, and goals. At the same time, however, they also are physical objects, whose actions must be explicable in terms of physical laws. So far no satisfying account of this duality has been offered. Both Cartesian dualism and the modern materialist alternatives (reductionist and antireductionist) have failed to capture the full range of our experience of persons. I (...)
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  39. 4. The Characterization Question.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 73-92.
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  40. (1 other version)Community, consciousness, and dynamic self-understanding.Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. Special Issue 12 (1):27-29.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 27-29 [Access article in PDF] Community, Consciousness, and Dynamic Self-Understanding Marya Schechtman Keywords consciousness, unconscious, self-understanding, embedded consciousness, personal identity I would like to thank both of my commentators for their generous and insightful comments. After an extremely clear and accurate summary of my position, Grant Gillett suggests that it should be supplemented with a recognition that the self-understanding I describe is rooted (...)
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  41.  83
    Carol Rovane, The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics:The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics.Marya Schechtman - 1999 - Ethics 109 (4):919-922.
  42.  25
    Conclusion.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 67-70.
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  43.  13
    Contents.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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  44.  35
    6. Characterization and the Four Features.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 136-162.
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  45.  39
    Commentary on "Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity".Marya Schechtman - 2020 - International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 13 (1):129-133.
    Mary Walker and Catriona Mackenzie's "Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity" provides much needed reflection on the lens through which ethical concerns about the use of neurotechnologies are usually viewed. There is a general worry about the sometimes rapid and radical effects that such technologies can have on personalities and values. These concerns are often described as worries about how such technologies might alter our identities or compromise our authenticity. Clear theorizing of the notoriously slippery notions of "identity" and "authenticity" is, (...)
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  46.  13
    Frontmatter.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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  47.  27
    Introduction.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 1-4.
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  48.  24
    Index.Marya Schechtman - 1996 - In The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 165-173.
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  49.  21
    184 philosophical abstracts.Marya Schechtman - 1994 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (2).
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  50. (1 other version)Philip J. Regal, The Anatomy of Judgement Reviewed by.Marya Schechtman - 1991 - Philosophy in Review 11 (1):62-64.
     
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