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Author: Harold W. Noonan
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-06
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1134482132
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA comprehensive introduction to the nature of the self and its relation to the body, this title places the problem of personal identity in the context of more general puzzles about identity, and discusses the major related theories.
Author: John Perry
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Published: 2002-06-15
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 1603847847
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume collects a number of Perry’s classic works on personal identity as well as four new pieces, The Two Faces of Identity,Persons and Information,Self-Notions and The Self, and The Sense of Identity. Perry’s Introduction puts his own work and that of others on the issues of identity and personal identity in the context of philosophical studies of mind and language over the past thirty years.
Author: David Shoemaker
Publisher: Broadview Press
Published: 2008-10-07
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1551118823
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us to the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? Personal Identity and Ethics provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity’s significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.
Author: Galen Strawson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-21
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 0691161003
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJohn Locke's theory of personal identity underlies all modern discussion of the nature of persons and selves—yet it is widely thought to be wrong. In this book, Galen Strawson argues that in fact it is Locke’s critics who are wrong, and that the famous objections to his theory are invalid. Indeed, far from refuting Locke, they illustrate his fundamental point. Strawson argues that the root error is to take Locke’s use of the word "person" as merely a term for a standard persisting thing, like "human being." In actuality, Locke uses "person" primarily as a forensic or legal term geared specifically to questions about praise and blame, punishment and reward. This point is familiar to some philosophers, but its full consequences have not been worked out, partly because of a further error about what Locke means by the word "conscious." When Locke claims that your personal identity is a matter of the actions that you are conscious of, he means the actions that you experience as your own in some fundamental and immediate manner. Clearly and vigorously argued, this is an important contribution both to the history of philosophy and to the contemporary philosophy of personal identity.
Author: Amy Kind
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2015-10-02
Total Pages: 118
ISBN-13: 1509500243
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs persons, we are importantly different from all other creatures in the universe. But in what, exactly, does this difference consist? What kinds of entities are we, and what makes each of us the same person today that we were yesterday? Could we survive having all of our memories erased and replaced with false ones? What about if our bodies were destroyed and our brains were transplanted into android bodies, or if instead our minds were simply uploaded to computers? In this engaging and accessible introduction to these important philosophical questions, Amy Kind brings together three different areas of research: the nature of personhood, theories of personal identity over time, and the constitution of self-identity. Surveying the key contemporary theories in the philosophical literature, Kind analyzes and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. As she shows, our intuitions on these issues often pull us in different directions, making it difficult to develop an adequate general theory. Throughout her discussion, Kind seamlessly interweaves a vast array of up-to-date examples drawn from both real life and popular fiction, all of which greatly help to elucidate this central topic in metaphysics. A perfect text for readers coming to these issues for the first time, Persons and Personal Identity engages with some of the deepest and most important questions about human nature and our place in the world, making it a vital resource for students and researchers alike.
Author: Derek Layder
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2004-02-24
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 1848606036
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow can you understand yourself? Where do your views, attitudes and values come from and why do they change? This accessible and illuminating book provides a reliable guide to these questions. The book: · Demonstrates that personal identity is formed around basic needs for security and self-esteem and the personal desires that flow from them · Shows the role of the emotions in personal life · Explores the limits of approaches that deny the existence of ′individuals′ and ′personal experience′ · Demonstrates how we build on everyday problems and dilemmas of life to shape our moods, attitudes and feelings. Shrewd and compelling, the book will be of interest to anyone studying Social Psychology and Sociology.
Author: Georg Gasser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-11-15
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 1107014441
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book addresses whether personal identity is analyzable, with innovative discussion of 'complex' and 'simple' theories.
Author: Geoffrey Madell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-11-20
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 1317584139
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes (a) that there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’; (b), that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and (c), that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine. Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell’s view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind.
Author: Logi Gunnarsson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-11
Total Pages: 421
ISBN-13: 1135212813
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs witnessed by recent films such as Fight Club and Identity, our culture is obsessed with multiple personality—a phenomenon raising intriguing questions about personal identity. This study offers both a full-fledged philosophical theory of personal identity and a systematic account of multiple personality. Gunnarsson combines the methods of analytic philosophy with close hermeneutic and phenomenological readings of cases from different fields, focusing on psychiatric and psychological treatises, self-help books, biographies, and fiction. He develops an original account of personal identity (the authorial correlate theory) and offers a provocative interpretation of multiple personality: in brief, "multiples" are right about the metaphysics but wrong about the facts.
Author: Marya Schechtman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-03-14
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0191507784
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJudgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
