Organisms and Personal Identity

Organisms and Personal Identity PDF Author: A.M. Ferner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317245709
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Over his philosophical career, David Wiggins has produced a body of work that, though varied and wide-ranging, stands as a coherent and carefully integrated whole. In this book Ferner examines Wiggins’ conceptualist-realism, his sortal theory ‘D’ and his human being theory in order to assess how far these elements of his systematic metaphysics connect. In addition to rectifying misinterpretations and analysing the relations between Wiggins’ works, Ferner reveals the importance of the philosophy of biology to Wiggins’ approach. This book elucidates the biological anti-reductionism present in Wiggins’ work and highlights how this stance stands as a productive alternative to emergentism. With an analysis of Wiggins’ construal of substances, specifically organisms, the book goes on to discuss how Wiggins brings together the concept of a person with the concept of a natural substance, or human being. An extensive introduction to the work of David Wiggins, as well as a contribution to the dialogue between personal identity theorists and philosophers of biology, this book will appeal to students and scholars working in the areas of philosophy, biology and the history of Anglophone metaphysics.

Organisms and Personal Identity

Organisms and Personal Identity PDF Author: A.M. Ferner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317245709
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over his philosophical career, David Wiggins has produced a body of work that, though varied and wide-ranging, stands as a coherent and carefully integrated whole. In this book Ferner examines Wiggins’ conceptualist-realism, his sortal theory ‘D’ and his human being theory in order to assess how far these elements of his systematic metaphysics connect. In addition to rectifying misinterpretations and analysing the relations between Wiggins’ works, Ferner reveals the importance of the philosophy of biology to Wiggins’ approach. This book elucidates the biological anti-reductionism present in Wiggins’ work and highlights how this stance stands as a productive alternative to emergentism. With an analysis of Wiggins’ construal of substances, specifically organisms, the book goes on to discuss how Wiggins brings together the concept of a person with the concept of a natural substance, or human being. An extensive introduction to the work of David Wiggins, as well as a contribution to the dialogue between personal identity theorists and philosophers of biology, this book will appeal to students and scholars working in the areas of philosophy, biology and the history of Anglophone metaphysics.

Animalism

Animalism PDF Author: Stephan Blatti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019960875X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
What are we? What is the nature of the human person? Animalism has a straightforward answer to these long-standing philosophical questions: we are animals. Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring this increasingly popular view, some defending animalism, others criticizing it, and others exploring its more philosophical implications.

Organisms and Personal Identity

Organisms and Personal Identity PDF Author: A.M. Ferner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317245695
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Over his philosophical career, David Wiggins has produced a body of work that, though varied and wide-ranging, stands as a coherent and carefully integrated whole. In this book Ferner examines Wiggins’ conceptualist-realism, his sortal theory ‘D’ and his human being theory in order to assess how far these elements of his systematic metaphysics connect. In addition to rectifying misinterpretations and analysing the relations between Wiggins’ works, Ferner reveals the importance of the philosophy of biology to Wiggins’ approach. This book elucidates the biological anti-reductionism present in Wiggins’ work and highlights how this stance stands as a productive alternative to emergentism. With an analysis of Wiggins’ construal of substances, specifically organisms, the book goes on to discuss how Wiggins brings together the concept of a person with the concept of a natural substance, or human being. An extensive introduction to the work of David Wiggins, as well as a contribution to the dialogue between personal identity theorists and philosophers of biology, this book will appeal to students and scholars working in the areas of philosophy, biology and the history of Anglophone metaphysics.

Staying Alive

Staying Alive PDF 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.

Personal Identity and Ethics

Personal Identity and Ethics PDF Author: David Shoemaker
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551118823
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us to the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? Personal Identity and Ethics provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity’s significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.

The Human Animal

The Human Animal PDF Author: Eric T. Olson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198026471
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Rejecting several famous thought experiments dealing with personal identity, he instead argues that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive.

Personal Identity

Personal Identity PDF Author: Harold W. Noonan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134482132
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A comprehensive introduction to the nature of the self and its relation to the body, this title places the problem of personal identity in the context of more general puzzles about identity, and discusses the major related theories.

Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality

Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality PDF Author: Logi Gunnarsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135212813
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
As witnessed by recent films such as Fight Club and Identity, our culture is obsessed with multiple personality—a phenomenon raising intriguing questions about personal identity. This study offers both a full-fledged philosophical theory of personal identity and a systematic account of multiple personality. Gunnarsson combines the methods of analytic philosophy with close hermeneutic and phenomenological readings of cases from different fields, focusing on psychiatric and psychological treatises, self-help books, biographies, and fiction. He develops an original account of personal identity (the authorial correlate theory) and offers a provocative interpretation of multiple personality: in brief, "multiples" are right about the metaphysics but wrong about the facts.

Personal Identity

Personal Identity PDF Author: Georg Gasser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014441
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This book addresses whether personal identity is analyzable, with innovative discussion of 'complex' and 'simple' theories.

Doctor Who and Philosophy

Doctor Who and Philosophy PDF Author: Courtland Lewis
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 0812696883
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Philosophers look at the deeper issues raised by the adventures of Doctor Who, the main character in the long-running science fiction TV series of the same name.