In the article the author inquires whether Robert Spaemann's naturalistic arguments for the claim that every human being is a person (in his book 'Persons: The Difference Between 'Someone' and 'Something' (Personen. Versuche ueber den Unterschied zwischen 'etwas' und 'jemand'); let us call it 'the personalistic thesis') are successful and whether it is possible to support Spaemann's ethical intuitions in the absence of the personalistic thesis. In particular, he discusses several ontological interpretations of the twin fission phenomenon. He concludes that although Spaemann's arguments are not valid, an alternative argumentation is possible on the basis of the moral importance of the (personal) identity relation and the moral importance of the 'person-making' teleology.
There are two general views about the nature of what matters, i.e. about the metaphysical ground of prudential concern, the ground of the concern we have for our own future welfare. On the one hand, the identity - is – what - matters view tells us that prudential concern is grounded on one’s continuing identity over time; I am concerned with my own future welfare because it is my own future welfare. On the other hand, the identity – is – not – what - matters view tells us that prudential concern is not grounded on such continuing identity; rather, it is grounded on some continuity - relation, which only coincides with identity. In this paper, the author explores a primary motivation for the latter view — viz., Parfit’s fission case — and show that there are interesting ways to resist it.
Recently, emotion has attracted much attention in many areas of philosophy. In the philosophy of mind, some argue that emotions are individuated and identified with reference to feelings, beliefs, desires, or perceptions. Furthermore, they are often claimed to be changeable, unstable, and ambivalent. However, despite their instability, emotions are sometimes long-standing. They have, in addition, perspective. These characteristics of the emotions help us in solving one of philosophy’s most enduring problems, that is, the problem of personal identity. In order to illustrate this claim the author elaborates on the conception of ‘experiential memory’ suggested by Wollheim. To understand memory as experiential, we need to understand the affective element attached to some memories. The author argues that memory affects not only our past thought but also our past emotions, and those emotions deriving from the past stay on to affect our whole being and our future. Hence, the experiential memory is not just confined to the recalling of events or experiences that the subject has experienced, but concerns the narrative structure of a person’s life as a whole.
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We are what we remember. Memories give shape to identity on the individual level as well as the social one. Events from the past create personal history, which is put in narration in order to emphasise the coherence of human life and its reasonableness. In this story a special role is played by the recalling subject, who is not always identical with the main character. The most common form of autobiographical narration is expressed in the first person singular. However, sometimes it takes a plural form or seems to be impersonal, particularly if it concerns a character that is significantly different in age or appearance form the speaker. The subject, looking at a photograph of himself/herself, is sometimes surprised and seems to be a totally different person. For analytical purposes a category of the point of view is useful. It helps to describe frequent changes of perspective as regards the presentation of a character and events.
The work analyzes two competing arguments in the issue of abortion and shows that each requires a different theory of personal identity. Further, the author analyzes those theories and he shows what moral premises they are compatible with and what implications there are for the abortion debate.
The author tries to argue that, from the methodological position of reflected equilibrium, it seems to be reasonable to build a theory of personal identity that enables a person to continue her existence after the biological death of her body. This conclusion is supported by the argument that our practice reflects that our identity-pre-supposing concerns reach beyond biological continuity. We have also good reasons to maintain such concerns and practices. As the best candidate to implement such concerns in a theoretical account of practical identity, he will identify the person-life view, where personal identity depends to a great extent on social conditions. The author also shows how this theory can implement the classical belief in the afterlife, and how it could conceptualize the difference of the afterlife from a physical and a theistic point of view.
Consider a specific type of fission where psychological continuity takes a branching form, and one of the offshoots comes into being later than the other offshoot. Let us say that the earlier offshoot comes into being in the left branch at t, and the later offshoot comes into being in the right branch at t+1. With regard to the question how many persons are involved in this case, three answers are worth considering: (i) the original subject persist up to t; a distinct person comes into being immediately after t and continues to exist in the left branch; and the third person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. (ii) The original subject persists up to the moment immediately before t+1; a distinct person comes into being at t+1 and continues to exist in the left branch; and the third person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. (iii) The original subject continues to exist in the left branch; a distinct person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. For those who hold that personal identity consist in psychological continuity of some sort, the aforementioned three options exhaust the sensible ways of understanding how one persists in delayed fission. Hence, delayed fission poses a challenge for the psychological approach to personal identity.
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The relation between love and violence is a difficult theme to restrain. It was the leading point of my research in what cornced my Master Thesis. In that thesis I investigated the way how Vergilio Ferreira kept a relation between love and violence in all his work. In the present paper I intend to present, brifely, the result of my research, trying to answer to the folowing question: how is the relation, the ways of contamination and inter conection between love and violence on Vergilio Ferreira’s work?
The problems of the self (ātman) and personal identity over time were thoroughly analysed in the classical Indian philosophy. The Buddhist philosophers rejected the Brahmanical commitment to a permanent unitary self which persists through changes of body and mind, and held that the self is a mere conceptual or thought construction (prajñāpti): there is no reality in the self; when we look more closely at what we call ‘I’, we will find only a stream of perceptions. Contrarily, the orthodox (āstika) philosophers argue that many common phenomena like memory or recognitive perception (pratyabhijñā) could not take place, if the rememberer and knower were different. One must endure through time as the same identical subject to be able to remember, have desire, commitments, responsibility etc. In favour of the classical Brahmanical position the author argues that if a person is nothing more than a bundle of different fleeting psycho-physical states, none of them can be plausibly explained. The paper brings out also some connections between the Indian and the Western debates over the personal identity problem.
This paper focuses on three theories of personal identity that incorporate the idea that personal identity is the result of a person’s adopting certain attitudes towards certain mental states and actions. The author calls these theories subjective theories of personal identity. He argues that it is not clear what the proponents of these theories mean by “personal identity”. On standard theories, such as animalism or psychological theories, the term “personal identity” refers to the numerical identity of persons and its analysis provides the persistence conditions for persons. He argues that if the subjective theories purport to provide a criterion of numerical personal identity, they fail. A different interpretation may suggest that they purport to provide a non-numerical type of identity for the purpose of providing plausible analyses of certain identity-related practical concerns. The author argues that the criteria the subjective theories provide fail to capture several of the identity-related concerns. As a result, this interpretation must be rejected as well.
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This paper argues for the thesis that the reality of mind is a necessary as well as sufficient condition for a diachronic identity of human person. The impossibility of elimination of qualia and intentionality and thus the impossibility of eliminative materialism was proved here. An impossibility of the theory of identity of types and individuals, together with the impossibility of functionalism as one of the versions of eliminative materialism was proven through a careful consideration of Libet's experiments. Subsequently, dualism surfaced as further option. The views of interactive dualism of Popper and Eccles and that of pragmatic dualism of Carrier and Mittelstrass turned out to be unsuitable in some of their consequences. Hylemorphic dualism turned out to be the best explanation from the sorts of dualism discussed in this paper. Through its understanding of mind as a form, hylemorphic dualism enables us to explain causality as formal and final and thus to separate it form the efficient causality of empirical objects. By this, it also explains the diachronic identity of human person possible.
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