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Personal Identity
Personal Identity can be broken down into three areas: 1.) Body 2.) Memory and 3.) Soul. In John Perry's "A Dialogue on Personal Identity and
Immortality" these composing aspects of personal identity are discussed at length. In the reading and class discussions the body was defined clearly as a part of one's person, even alluded to at times as a "prison" in which one cannot escape until one dies. Memory and one's Soul seemed to be lumped together many times, understandably so, for the two bare many things in common such as they are intangible, cannot be completely defined as to what each exactly is (people remember things that did not actually happen to them, are those still memories?; do you have one soul throughout your life?), and both are thought to compose one's character and beliefs. This essay will deal with the two aspects of one's personal identity which are the most obvious in day to day life, that of the body and of soul/memory.
As stated beforehand, memory and the soul bare many of the same qualities.
The body and soul, however, also share this trait. Perry illustrates in his essay that the body and soul are similar because there is a "link" between one another, that is they both make up a person and are responsible for the qualities associated with being an individual (height, weight, character, belief, etc.). Perry also comes back to challenge this using the analogy of a river.
If one goes to a river, and then the next day goes back to the same river, the person will not say that it is a different river, although almost all of the properties of the river have changed (water molecules, pollution level, temperature, etc.). This is the same with a person, for we say that a person at adolescence is still the same person at adulthood, even though the the persons beliefs, knowledge, and character may have changed over the years. Perry answers this problem by saying that we can still regard the person as the same by the relative "similarity" of the person to how they were in the past, and that "[the] sameness of body is a reliable sign of sameness of all; of soul" .
In another example, Perry differentiates between the body and the soul by saying that "personal identity" (referring to the soul/mind) cannot be based on bodily identity, for one can judge who one is without having to make any judgments about the body. Perry continues to elaborate on this by saying even if he woke
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
Although the concept of identity is recurrent in our daily lives, it has interpreted in various ways.
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.
We traveled to the west coast of Wales to find out how a river changes
In the real life, it is hard to judge our personal identity: we are aware of who we are every second and minute, we also are able to check our appearance that we have known since we were born from looking at mirror. We know “I am myself” all the time.
Identity-“Ones personal qualities.”Identiy is something only he or she can fully define. My uncle says I am affectionate,cheerful, and calm. My grandmother sees me as slim, pretty and sweet. My dad described me as perky, cheerful and happy, my mom says beautiful, gentle, and self-conscious. These adjectives describe me accurately, yet they are only abstract versions of me. Adjectives cannot begin to describe me and I aknowlege these descriptions for what they are, a condensed translation from my outward self to the world. It is impossible for anyone to understand me completely because nobody has experienced the things I have. My mother has never cherished a raggedy doll named Katie and my father never spent hours upon hours making collages and scrap books for his future children. My uncle never hid in the back of a pick-up-truck and traveled four hours to New York and my grandmother has never walked hours in the rain looking for the Queen of England. My identity is something only I can define.
A Philosophical Criticism of Augustine and Aquinas: The Relationship of Soul and Body The relationship of the human soul and physical body is a topic that has mystified philosophers, scholars, scientists, and mankind as a whole for centuries. Human beings, who are always concerned about their place as individuals in this world, have attempted to determine the precise nature or state of the physical form. They are concerned for their well-being in this earthly environment, as well as their spiritual well-being; and most have been perturbed by the suggestion that they cannot escape the wrongs they have committed while in their physical bodies.
“a person does not ‘inhabit’ a static object body but is subjectively embodied in a fluid, emergent, and negotiated process of being. In this process, body, self, and social interaction are interrelated to such an extent that distinctions between them are not only permeable and shifting but also actively manipulated and configured”
A riverbank can be found where two worlds, earth and water, connect. Any river will have two banks, one on either side of the water. Rosa has created a character who has found a "third bank on the river," a third way to separate land from the sea. This bank belongs to an entirely different world. Rosa has found a way for the father to exist, yet not exist, within the family. He is connected to his family and weighs heavily upon their minds even though he is a part of an entirely different world. He has discovered this link by establishing a "third bank of the river."
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:
Webster's dictionary describes identity as sameness of essential character, individuality, or the fact of being the same person as one claims to be. So your identity can include your name, your age, your job title, or simply characteristics of your body. These things are facts, facts you don't care to share with the world. Just as the word suggests your identity is something by which you can be identified. These are things that describe a person in terms a stranger would understand. This area of identity is proof of who you are. However, your identity is also composed of what you are. They mark your role in society. Who you are and what you do make up your identity. This is essential in the human life span because people are always searching to find where they truly belong in the world.
RECALL: The writer makes several important points in “Body and Mind” from “Problems from Philosophy”. The writer discusses the idea of the body being a material entity and the mind as an immaterial entity. The mind and body problems arise due to the different types of facts and their relation with each other. The concept of mind body dualism is an attempt to solve this conflict between these two entities and the main points discussed in the chapter are: 1) According to the ‘Conceivability Argument for Dualism’, presented by Descartes, the mind and the body cannot exist without each other and if they were to do so, they would not be the same thing; 2) Physical facts are proven through observations but mental states are private and cannot be
It was tradition. Every Sunday after church my dad, brother, and I would drive through the fields checking crops and whatever else made their homes in my father's fields. Then we'd drive down to the river to check how high or low it was, or to see how much worse the river was cutting into the land. The river flowed right at the end of the road, so my dad would always pretend he was going to drive straight into it. We live about one in a half miles from the Missouri River. We have our own private road that winds down to a small shoot that connects to it. Because of our closeness to the Missouri, I have grown to love and admire it. It is an enormous and amazing machine to me. I find peace and love for it. It's funny how much alike Jeff, Luke, (the two main characters in Kent Meyer's The River Warren) and I are towards our rivers. Their River Warren is my Big Missouri.
by water as the flood advances, reaching as far inland from the main channel as 12 miles."
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 life, such as human dignity and personal identity. The mind-body problem entails two theories, dualism and physicalism. Dualism contends that distinct mental and physical realms exist, and they both must be taken into account. Its counterpart (weak) physicalism views the human as being completely bodily and physical, encompassing no non-physical, or spiritual, substances.