A Dialogue On Personal Identity And Immortality Summary

1006 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The search for self-identity

For this paper I am going to argue that in “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” Gretchen Weirod was correct by claiming that personal identify cannot consist in the sameness of an immaterial, unobservable soul. My view is that one is who they are because of the brain/mind not their soul. (52) I will begin by stating Weirods position towards Sam Millers claim. Weirod argues that because sameness of body and sameness of psychological characteristics, that doesn’t automatically mean sameness of person, one can’t claim they know who she is. If they do know who she is then personal identity doesn’t consist in sameness of immaterial soul. One doesn’t know if they have had the same soul all their life. In that sense, one doesn’t even know if other people have had the same soul all their life. Weirod states that the soul and mind cannot be the same thing because there is no way of proving it. Thus giving us her argument where sameness …show more content…

Weirod says what if the soul changes daily or perhaps yearly, and that every time it changes its with a different soul that has similar psychological characteristics as the last soul, how would one be able to measure that, if the soul cannot be seen or touched? How would one know that their soul isn’t changing constantly if there is no way for them to find out or more importantly prove it? Weirod clearly states if the soul cannot be observed it cannot be associated with the body. In other words, soul has no identity. With that being said, Weirod claims that if there isn’t anyway of proving having a soul, there can’t be any prediction that the soul will be with her or in this case with anyone in the afterlife as it is with her and us now. That claim made by Weirod can be supported by her saying that when she dies she will be buried and rot away and perhaps there is no afterlife at all.

Show More
Related

  • John Perry A Dialogue On Personal Identity

    1153 Words  | 3 Pages

    Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the

    Read More

  • Understanding and Accepting Parfit's Nature of Persisting Persons

    1765 Words  | 4 Pages

    Parfit’s view on the nature of persisting persons raises interesting issues in terms of identity. Though there are identifiable objections to his views, I am in favor of the argument he develops. This paper will layout Parfit’s view on that nature of persisting person, show support as well as argue the objections to the theory. In Derek Parfit’s paper Personal Identity, Parfit provides a valid account of persisting persons through time through his clear account of psychological continuities. He calls people to accept the argument that people persist through time but people do not persist or survive by way of identity.

    Read More

  • Aristotle's Theory Of The Soul

    702 Words  | 2 Pages

    She has the belief that the soul is attached to the body. The soul needs the body to still have existence. The soul is not its own individual being. The soul does not exist without a body and yet is not itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind (De Anima 414a20) Without the ability to think and use the brain our soul has no purpose. The soul is a part of us that helps the body become a working body. Something living. The functioning of the soul depends on the function of the brain. To validate the theory even further, Melissa comes to conclusion , even though Matthews body is still able to function on life support, the brain is not working anymore. Adding one more point to the theory to help Melissa with her decision of her

    Read More

  • Identity in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Isaac Babel’s My First Goose

    1747 Words  | 4 Pages

    Although the concept of identity is recurrent in our daily lives, it has interpreted in various ways.

    Read More

  • The Memory Theory Of John Locke And Locke's Personal Identity

    1057 Words  | 3 Pages

    Personal identity examines what makes a person at one time identical with a person at another. Many philosophers believe we are always changing and therefore, we cannot have a persisting identity if we are different from one moment to the next. However, many philosophers believe there is some important feature that determines a person’s identity and keeps it persistent. For John Locke, this important feature is memory, and I agree. Memory is the most important feature in determining a person’s identity as memory is the necessary and sufficient condition of personal identity.

    Read More

  • Argument On Personal Identity

    1010 Words  | 3 Pages

    Weirob does not accept that, she thinks that would be an extrapolation, compare to other billions observed. Here where Weirob’s argument would be objected. She does not agree that the identity can be personal, she thinks personal identity is the way other’s identify each other. She excludes the actual personal point of view. One can fool everyone and receive a facial and voice reconstruction, change mannerism to have others identify him/her as some one who is not one. This phony person will still be personally identify as him/herself, but to others he will be miss-identified. In the case of brain transplant Weirob agrees that the body with the “new” brain should have the personal identity of the “body” . She does not agrees to brain transplant procedure because of this thinking. What if we can imagine that there are parallel universe with the same Gretchen Weirob in it. Same age, same job, same body, but different memories, thoughts, and feelings. If these two can meet somehow in the same universe, according to Gretchen and everyone around, these two are two identical people, not the same person. Why can’t we apply the same principle to Miller’s example of how others perceive two Kleenex boxes to be identical. Weirob is very sensitive to the word Miller uses

    Read More

  • John Perry's Dialogue On Personal Identity And Imorality?

    1342 Words  | 3 Pages

    In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, Dave Cohen and Sam Miller visit Gretchen Weirob in the hospital because of Weirob’s injury in a motorcycle accident, they raise a discussion on personal identity. Cohen later takes up issues raised in the case where Julia’s brain is taken from her deteriorated body and placed on the healthy body of Mary whose brain has been destroyed. Therefore Mary has her own body with Julia’s memory and personality. The case proposes an argument

    Read More

  • Richard Swinburne's Account Of Duality And Materialism

    1041 Words  | 3 Pages

    The contention that the similarity of mind alone conserves a human person’s identity comes to the fore in Aquinas’s account of bodily resurrection, in which he asserts that the uniqueness of a resurrected human person is “made when the same soul is conjoined to the numerically same body.”12 The characteristics of a resurrected body is affected by nothing other than its being informed by the same soul that informed it before death. This unleashes the potential because a soul is the intellectual and immaterial mind of its body and is that by which the body exists with specific tangible limits creating an individual human person.

    Read More

  • Personal Identity by Derek Parfit

    1917 Words  | 4 Pages

    In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010).

    Read More

  • Four Arguments For The World Of Life In Plato's Phaedo

    1217 Words  | 3 Pages

    The next argument is called “the affinity” it simply reiterates that the world of the forms is superior to the world of senses. This argument is intended to establish only the probability of the soul’s continued existence after the death of the body. The soul is more like the world of forms. The body is the mortal part of us, the part that passes away. Which makes him believe the soul is divine. If the soul is freed from the pleasures of the body, it’s most likely to participate in the world of forms.

    Read More

  • Philosophy Paper #1: Personal Identity

    1056 Words  | 3 Pages

    What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:

    Read More

  • Analysis Of René Descartes: The Existence Of Self

    1074 Words  | 3 Pages

    These mental sensations of the soul cannot be explained by any simplistic illustration, as can be readily evidenced through modern technology. Machinery can be programmed to perform several of the basic physical tasks that humans can perform (Nagel). A baby doll, for instance, can respond to stimuli and cry or perhaps verbalize a simple phrase. Yet, while this baby doll behaves similarly to a human, it is not truly responding to a complex environment; instead, it is restricted by its programming (Nagel). The baby doll will never learn a new phrase to say, and it will not always cry when the same event occurs. In fact, it may cry for no real reason at all. This distinguishes humans from such technology. People have “conscious [experiences]” (Nagel) that are unique to each individual’s soul, reinforcing the division between mind and

    Read More

  • The Quest For Identity

    645 Words  | 2 Pages

    Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveals one of life’s most relevant purposes that stretches across cultures and relates to every aspect of enlightenment. The novel examines the life of the strong-willed Janie Crawford, as she goes down the path of self-discovery by way of her past relationships. Ideas regarding the path of liberation date all the way back to the teachings of Siddhartha. Yet, its concept is still recycled in the twenty-first century, as it inspires all humanity to look beyond the “horizon,” as Janie explains. Self-identification, or self-fulfillment, is a theme that persists throughout the book, remaining a quest for Janie Crawford to discover, from the time she begins to tell the story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston makes a point at the beginning of the novel to separate the male and female identities from one another. This is important for the reader to note. The theme for identity, as it relates to Janie, carefully unfolds as the story goes on to expand the depths of the female interior.

    Read More

  • Self Essay: Dualism On The Concept Of Self

    1148 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many scientific fields studying parts of the mind and brain do not account for the possibility of dualism. However, upon closer analysis, concepts in materialism obtaining to the self has many problems of its own. Arguments from physicalism, the identity theory, and behaviorism, when applied the problem of the self, seem to all in some way lead back to some sort of dualism. While dualism has its limitations, it does not include a feature that leads to other branches of thought, such as materialism, which through its inconsistencies, seem to always somehow refer back to dualism. This shows not only a supported dualist ideal definition of the self, but could also be applied to other problems that Searle has pointed

    Read More

  • A.I. Film Analysis

    1587 Words  | 4 Pages

    It is apparent that we are personified entities, but also, that we embrace “more” than just our bodies. “Human persons are physical, embodied beings and an important feature of God’s intended design for human life” (Cortez, 70). But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human mental life such as human dignity and personal identity.

    Read More

More about A Dialogue On Personal Identity And Immortality Summary

Open Document