- Title
- Personal identity and consciousness
- Creator
- Wright, John
- Relation
- Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 55, p. 235-263
- Relation
- http://www.huji.ac.il/huji/eng/
- Publisher
- Hebrew Univerity of Jerusalem, S.H. Bergman Centre for Philosophical Studies
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2006
- Description
- Much recent thought about personal identity has been dominated by the idea that what makes someone the same person from one time to a later time is that the psychological contents of the mind of the person at the earlier time causally determine, in some special way, the psychological contents of the mind of that person at the later time. This general approach can perhaps be traced back to John Locke. Two recent philosophers who incorporate elements of this approach in their writings are Sydney Shoemaker and Robert Nozick. An aim of this paper is to argue that this approach is mistaken. One alternative approach identifies a person with an immaterial soul, which can continue to exist no matter how radically the psychological contents of the person's mind are altered. A modern representative of this approach is Richard Swinburne. But a disadvantage of this view is that it is available only to someone who is prepared to accept mind-body dualism. A third approach is to say, with authors such as Bernard Williams, that the persistence of the body is necessary for personal identity. But this rules out as impossible what is, for many people, at least a conceptual possibility: that we may be able to exist without our material bodies. The aim of this paper is to develop an account of personal identity, available to the materialist but not only to the materialist, which allows that the self can continue t exist no matter how radically the psychological contents of the mind are altered,but which nevertheless also allows the possibility of disembodied existence.
- Subject
- personal identity; disembodied existence; psychological contents of the mind; immaterial soul; mind-body dualism
- Identifier
- uon:931
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/26563
- Identifier
- ISSN:0021-3306
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