But there is often said to be something soft about matters of identity over time. How many parts of my bicycle do I need to replace before I get a numerically different bike?
If a club disbands and years later some of the original members start a similar club with the same name, have we got two clubs, or one club with a discontinuous history? It is tempting to say that there are no hard answers to these questions laid up in heaven.
There is no determinate fact of the matter. Those who disagree about such things are arguing about words, not facts. We are free to say what we like. Persistence Identity. Composition and coincidence Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 4 : Material Constitution Coincident Objects.
The Human Animal. Personal identity without psychology Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 1 : Continental Philosophy. Animalism and the corpse problem Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 2 : The apparent fact that each of us coincides with a thinking animal looks like a strong argument for our being animals animalism. Some critics, however, claim that this sort of reasoning actually undermines animalism. According to them, the apparent fact that each human animal coincides with a thinking body that is not an animal is an equally strong argument for our not being animals.
I argue that the critics' case fails for reasons that do not affect the case for animalism. In "Was I Ever a Fetus? Baker claims that the argument is invalid, and that both the premise and the conclusion are false.
I attempt to defend argument, premise, and conclusion against her objections. Psychological Theories of Personal Identity. Was Jekyll Hyde? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 2. Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated.
I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split-personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there ar… Read more Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated.
This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals.
Dissociative Identity Disorder. Critical notice of T. Merricks, Objects and Persons review Philosophical Books 43 4 : The rate of time's passage Analysis 69 1 : Many philosophers say that time involves a kind of passage that distinguishes it from space.
A traditional objection is that this passage would have to occur at some rate, yet we cannot say what the rate would be. This appears to refute decisively not only the view that time passes, but any tensed theory of time. The Passage of Time, Misc.
Stefan eds. Accounts of personal identity over time are supposed to fall into two broad categories: 'complex views' saying that our persistence consists in something else, and 'simple views' saying that it doesn' t. But it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed.
After arguing for this claim, the paper says something about how the debate might be better characterized. This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers.
I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be. I consider four possible answers to this question: The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and they are denizens of an entire… Read more This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers.
I consider four possible answers to this question: The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that could not be right, that collapses into, and that would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting.
Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life. Artificial Life. Ethics and the generous ontology Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 4 : Identity and Necessity. Saul A. Kripke - - In Milton Karl Munitz ed.
Proof of an External World. Moore - - H. Survival and Identity. David K. Lewis - - In Amelie Oksenberg Rorty ed. University of California Press. Mark Heller - - Cambridge University Press. The Concept of Identity. Eli Hirsch - - Oxford University Press. Andrew M. Bailey - - Philosophy Compass 10 12 Chad Carmichael - - Mind Ordinary Objects. Daniel Z. Korman - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Curtis - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Living Without Microphysical Supervenience. Alex Moran - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies A variant of the argument implies that I have no head. Maybe that sounds silly. Are there such things as hands but no such things as hand complements?
Does something prevent my hand complement from thinking? Do I share my thoughts with a vast number of other beings of different sizes? How could I ever know which one I am? None of those alternatives looks any better than denying the existence of hands. At any rate, those are the options. There is no easy, comfortable position here. Can you say what you think the problem is with this view as I think it is a good example of the fascination of this area of philosophy and your approach.
EO: This is a technically demanding topic some readers may want to skip ahead. But my hand is a part of me and not a part of my hand complement. How could we be the same thing? How could one thing both have and not have a hand as a part? Well, we know that a thing can have different parts at different times: if I have a bad accident at the sawmill, my hand might be a part of me today but not tomorrow.
Hudson proposes that a thing can have different parts at different places. So the hand could be a part of both me and my hand complement which are the same thing at the place where that hand is located, and not a part of either being at some other place. What appear to be two things with different parts are in some cases just one thing, made up of more than one set of parts at once.
But how can we generalise it? Meanwhile, the local museum has been collecting the cast-off pieces, which they manage to assemble just as they were when Theseus first set sail. So there are now two ships: the repaired ship at sea and the reconstructed ship in the museum. If Hudson is right, we ought to be able to say that both are: the repaired ship is the reconstructed ship.
It simply has different parts at different places. If someone actually said this, we'd take her to be referring to the ship at sea by pointing to something else that represents it, just as she might do by pointing to a picture or a model of it. But what if she insisted that the ship in the museum and the ship at sea were literally just one ship?
That would be hard even to understand, never mind believe. It seems as obvious as anything can be that there are two ships if there are such things as ships at all , one in the museum and the other at sea.
Yet according to partism her statement ought to make perfect sense. Can you say what was the appeal of metaphysics? Jason Stanley says that he likens philosophy to novel writing. Is this something you can understand? It was rather the way he argued for these views. When he writes about something, the mist dissolves. Everything becomes plain. But his critics rarely manage to reveal an alternative landscape of equal clarity. To my eye, they only wrap things in mist again.
We do it because we think Plato might have something to teach us about the subject. So philosophers treat Plato in the way novelists treat Dickens : as a colleague rather than as a mere object of study.
But you could make the same point by saying that philosophy is like physics and not like the history of science, or like polevaulting and not like the study of athletics. I doubt whether the connection between philosophy and novel writing goes much deeper than that. For others, philosophy is redundant as science proceeds to explain away philosophy. So how do you face down these two contrary positions to your own?
EO: Many scientific discoveries have a direct bearing on philosophy. The laws of physics turn out to involve numbers that apparently could have been different - the mass of the electron, for example, or the relative strengths of the elementary forces - but which all have to fall within an extremely narrow range of values in order for life to be possible. If these things had been left to chance supposing that makes sense , the overwhelming likelihood is that the numbers would have had values resulting in a lifeless universe.
This is something that no philosopher ever imagined from the armchair. One salient answer is that it was designed that way by some sort of god.
To take another example, the science of colour vision has demolished volumes of a priori philosophising. Philosophers would be foolish to ignore this information. To say that science makes philosophy redundant is to say that science can supply all the answers: all legitimate questions can be answered by the methods of the sciences. This claim is trivially self-refuting. The methods of science cannot establish whether every legitimate question can be answered by those methods.
So the claim is illegitimate by its own standards. You can ignore philosophy, or try to reform it, but you can never do away with it altogether. Any attempt to dig its grave will only be more philosophy. Can you say something about this whole business of how philosophy should be done and how it gets perceived by outsiders? And for you, what makes philosophy so good? EO: Those complaints could be made about any period in the history of philosophy.
Most great philosophical works are dry and technical. I suspect that they simply find philosophy too hard. But philosophy is hard. No one would expect serious works of physics or mathematics or economics as opposed to popularisations to be immediately accessible to intelligent readers with no training in the subject.
Why should philosophy be any different? I concede that academic writing is very often harder to read than it needs to be. It tends to be larded with needless technical detail and jargon. But this holds for all subjects, and has nothing to do with philosophy in particular. If anything, philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition tend to write more clearly than their colleagues in many other fields.
Are you interested in x phi and what they bring to the philosophical table? Are you burning your armchair? This is important for those areas of philosophy that rely heavily on the opinions of ordinary people. Where do you get them? The traditional procedure is to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students, and if you find broad agreement, you take the judgment to be correct. This is all controversial and the results have been questioned. To my mind, the fact that ordinary people are inclined to say certain things when questioned about points of serious philosophical controversy is little reason to think that those sayings are true.
Perhaps most people, when told the brain-transplant story, really would say that you would go with your brain rather than staying behind with an empty head. But I worry when I disagree with other philosophers - people who are at least as able as I am and who have thought about the matter just as deeply. Fortunately there are points that we do agree about.
No one disputes that if psychological-continuity views of personal identity are true, then we are not animals, and that it follows from this that the animal you live in, so to speak, is either not intelligent or is a second intelligent being in addition to you. The controversy is about whether these consequences are acceptable.
0コメント