Author: Peter K. Unger
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
The topic of personal identity has prompted some of the liveliest and most interesting debates in recent philosophy. In a fascinating new contribution to the discussion, Peter Unger presents a psychologically aimed, but physically based, account of our identity over time. While supporting the account, he explains why many influential contemporary philosophers have underrated the importance of physical continuity to our survival, casting a new light on the work of Lewis, Nagel, Nozick, Parfit, Perry, Shoemaker, and others. Deriving from his discussion of our identity itself, Unger produces a novel but commonsensical theory of the relations between identity and some of our deepest concerns. In a conservative but flexible spirit, he explores the implications of his theory for questions of value and of the good life.
Author: Peter Unger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199729352
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
The topic of personal identity has prompted some of the liveliest and most interesting debates in recent philosophy. In a fascinating new contribution to the discussion, Peter Unger presents a psychologically aimed, but physically based, account of our identity over time. While supporting the account, he explains why many influential contemporary philosophers have underrated the importance of physical continuity to our survival, casting a new light on the work of Lewis, Nagel, Nozick, Parfit, Perry, Shoemaker, and others. Deriving from his discussion of our identity itself, Unger produces a novel but commonsensical theory of the relations between identity and some of our deepest concerns. In a conservative but flexible spirit, he explores the implications of his theory for questions of value and of the good life.
Author: Brian Garrett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134708017
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness is about persons and personal identity. What are we? And why does personal identity matter? Brian Garrett, using jargon-free language, addresses questions in the metaphysics of personal identity, questions in value theory, and discusses questions about the first person singular. Brian Garrett makes an important contribution to the philosophy of personal identity and mind, and to epistemology.
Author: Derek Parfit
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191622443
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 880
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Book Description
This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.
Author: Marya Schechtman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191507784
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
Author: Richard Swinburne
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198831498
Category : Human beings
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
What are humans? What makes us who we are? Many think that we are just complicated machines, or animals that are different from machines only by being conscious. In Are We Bodies or Souls? Richard Swinburne comes to the defence of the soul and presents new philosophical arguments that are supported by modern neuroscience. When scientific advances enable neuroscientists to transplant a part of brain into a new body, he reasons, no matter how much we can find out about their brain activity or conscious experiences we will never know whether the resulting person is the same as before or somebody entirely new. Swinburne thus argues that we are immaterial souls sustained in existence by our brains. Sensations, thoughts, and intentions are conscious events in our souls that cause events in our brains. While scientists might discover some of the laws of nature that determine conscious events and brain events, each person's soul is an individual thing and this is what ultimately makes us who we are.
Author: Udo Thiel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019954249X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity in early modern philosophy. He explores over a century of European philosophical debate from Descartes to Hume, and argues that our interest in human subjectivity remains strongly influenced by the conceptual framework of early modern thought.
Author: Sebastian Rdl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976517
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Sebastian Rödl undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. This profound work revives the thought that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Author: Rakiya Farah
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031444752
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
Does the Sexual Offences Act (SOA) 2003 provide for consent to be vitiated in all the circumstances we think it should? Can, and should, section 76(2)(b) (the impersonation provision) be read to include a different class of identity deceptions? How should the concept of personal identity be understood in this context? While the concept has had some airing in the courts, and the distinction between identity and attributes of the person softened, the law on rape still fails to give proper effect to identity deception and leaves many questions unanswered. This book offers a novel take on the problem of sexual deception. Through meticulous interrogation of the meaning and normative implications of the concept of personal identity, it challenges the law’s restrictive approach and argues that qualitative identity is, like numerical identity, normatively important. This book provides a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the philosophical, theoretical, and psychological experimental literature on personal identity, marshalling relevant insights to support a broader reading of the impersonation provision. The argumentative thrust of the book is an extended equivalence thesis, which links numerical with qualitative identity. In this task, it engages in capacious exploration of different kinds of impersonation, at each juncture leading the reader to a more permissive understanding. Guided by the principle of consistency, the central thesis is that certain deceptions about personal traits should be unlawful based on existing prohibitions with which there is equivalence. A central contribution of the book is the articulation of a theoretical framework to support a richer understanding of identity, giving due attention to its qualitative aspects. This new framework is applied at stage three of the equivalence thesis to explain the relationship between individual traits and identity change. By implication, a potentially wide scope of consent-vitiating deceptions is endorsed. This presents a challenge to those who would defend more stringent limits. The book thus invites further discussion on the implications of this approach for the law on rape and indicates areas for further research and attention.
