Drake Tevis
Philosophy 1000
A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immorality
In the passage “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality,” John Perry eludes to three different ways of thinking about personal identity. The three ideas were: a person is their body, a person is their immaterial soul, and a person has continuity of memory. Perry’s idea of that a person is their immaterial soul best describes personal identity.
In “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” Miller says, “[…] If you were merely a living human body, as this Kleenex box is merely cardboard and glue in a certain arrangement, then the death of your body would be the end of you. But surely you are more than that, fundamentally more than that. What is fundamentally you is not your body, but your soul or self or mind. […] They [souls] are the non-physical, nonmaterial, aspects of you. They [souls] are your consciousness”. Then Weirob says, “[…] if I understand you, this is not a remark about this body you see and could touch and I fear can smell. Rather it is a remark about a soul, which you cannot see or touch or smell. The fact that the same body was across the body was across the booth from you at Dorsey’s as in now lying in front of you on the bed-that would not mean that the same person was present on both occasions, if the same soul were not. And if, though some strange turn of events, the same soul were present on both occasions, but lodged in different bodies, then it would be the same person. Is that right”, (John Perry, page 385). This is significant, because John Perry is talking about one his hypothesis that a person is their immaterial soul. He is purposing that the immaterial soul is not the same as the physical body. He explains that ...
... middle of paper ...
...dy is. But Weirob is wise to point out, we are not justified in making such claims of correlation if we do not have some other, independent way of showing that souls are around whenever we think they are. Since we can never see or sense that souls are around, then we can never justify the claim that souls are correlated with bodies. Later you see that Miller challenges Weirob with the soul view again, this time he claims that we can reasonably determine a correlation between souls and bodies. He claims that because bodies exhibit certain behavior that it implies certain psychological characteristics, because someone may scream this or that, or argue in a certain manner, or be a happy or sad, or be really energetic or act like a inebriated fool, we can infer from this that there is the likeness of soul, and then correlate this with the likeness of the material body.
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
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.
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.
Sameness of person consists not in sameness of soul nor the sameness of body, but in sameness of consciousness. According to the memory view, the personal identity is established by (genuine) memory-relations. Locke’s theory manifests the idea that rather than being tied to our physical bodies, our identity is bound to our consciousness. Locke, in one of his works states that consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind. Essentially, meaning that consciousness equals memories. Unlike, the conventional theories; bodily and soul view, Locke’s views that memory relations constitute “a person is a sequence of person-stages linked by (genuine) memory.” As personal identity is not bound by a constant component of a person to be present over a whole lifetime, neither body nor a soul.
Self could be defined in different ways. In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, both characters Weirob and Cohen are correct on their argument of personal identity, there are just some imperfections on each of the views. My view of “persons are identical with brains” fills the gaps of ideas of them. Brain is the junction that could bring mind and
Identity, an ambiguous idea, plays an important part in today’s world. To me identity can be defined as who a person is or what differentiates one person from another. Identity would be a person’s name, age, height, ethnicity, personality, and more. A quote by Anne Sexton states “It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was”(Anne Sexton). This quote helps me define identity because I believe it is saying that identity is what people are remembered by. When some people think of identity, words such as, uniqueness, distinctiveness, or individuality may come to mind. However, I disagree with this because when I think of identity I think of mimicry, self-consciousness, or opinions.
I will argue that Locke believed that if you remain the same person, there are various entities contained in my body and soul composite that do not remain the same over time, or that we can conceive them changing. These entities are matter, organism (human), person (rational consciousness and memory), and the soul (immaterial thinking substance). This is a intuitive interpretation that creates many questions and problems. I will evaluate Locke's view by explaining what is and what forms personal identity, and then explaining how these changes do conceivably occur while a human remains the same person.
Even if one could say something definite about the soul, speculation on its nature would still be useless because in ...
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).
In his book, he addresses the questions of “What makes a person at two different times one and the same person? What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of each person over time?” (Parfit 1984:202)
The argument begins by making a distinction between corruptibility and incorruptibility. This distinction made is that because the body is corruptible, and the soul is viewed as a substance that is incorruptible, an explanation is needed as to how the soul can continue
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:
A person’s identity is shaped by many different aspects. Family, culture, friends, personal interests and surrounding environments are all factors that tend to help shape a person’s identity. Some factors may have more of an influence than others and some may not have any influence at all. As a person grows up in a family, they are influenced by many aspects of their life. Family and culture may influence a person’s sense of responsibilities, ethics and morals, tastes in music, humor and sports, and many other aspects of life. Friends and surrounding environments may influence a person’s taste in clothing, music, speech, and social activities. Personal interests are what truly set individuals apart. An individual is not a puppet on the string of their puppet-master, nor a chess piece on their master’s game board, individuals choose their own paths in life. They accomplish, or strive to accomplish, goals that they have set for themselves throughout their lifetime. Individuals are different from any other individual in the world because they live their own life rather than following a crowd of puppets. A person’s identity is defined by what shaped it in the first place, why they chose to be who they are, and what makes them different from everybody else in the world. I feel that I have developed most of my identity from my own dreams, fantasies, friends, and idols.
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
The soul can be defined as a perennial enigma that one may never understand. But many people rose to the challenge of effectively explaining just what the soul is about, along with outlining its desires. Three of these people are Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. Even though all three had distinctive views, the similarities between their views are strikingly vivid. The soul indeed is an enigma to mankind and the only rational explanation of its being is yet to come and may never arrive.