Personal Identity

Rating:
Summary: Passable, but not as good as it could be.
Review: Perry's anthology on the philosophy of personal identity has a good selection of analytic articles and essays, but little information that actually introduces and explores the field, which is especially necessary for those approaching the field for the first time. Neither does the text include certain study tools which would be extremely useful and would assist in a better treatment and understanding of the topic (such as a glossary of terms important to personal identity, etc.). All in all, I think the text could be greatly improved if it were more user-friendly and updated.

Rating:
Summary: A Nice, Albeit Somewhat Outdated, Anthology
Review: This is a first-rate anthology on personal identity that includes important historical work and recent (up to the 70s) discussions of the relevant issues. It begins with an informative introduction by Perry. The introduction presents the basic problem and the way philosophers traditionally have thought about it. Then Perry gives a summary of most important points made in the historical material included in the anthology.

What is the question of personal identity? Basically, it's the question of what makes a person one and the same person through time. I assume I'm very same person I was two days ago, two months ago, two years ago, two decades ago, etc. Given that I've changed a great deal over that period of time, how could this be? It seems like I, the very person sitting here and typing this now, was once an undergraduate planning to go to grad school, once a high school student getting ready for college, once a elementary school kid, and once a newborn baby. But it's clear that I don't look or think a lot like those previous people who appear to be one and the same as I am. There's been a lot of physical and psychological change over time, and yet I think I'm the very same person I was at those various times. How could that be?

And this is a philosophical issue that seems to have practical ramifications. It appears to have consequences for how we understand ourselves and other people: Does a person survive radical amnesia? How about brain death? Could a person survive after bodily death? Could there be multiple people in the same body at the same time? If a person's memories, beliefs, desires, etc. change so that there's little or no connection to her previous self, is she really the same person at all anymore? Consequences for how we relate to people: If my friend suffers from amnesia and never recovers his prior memories, is he really still my friend (is he still the same person I knew before)? If my mother is dying from a disease that has left her little more than a body rotting away in a hospital bed, is she still really my mother (i.e. the same person who raised me)? And moral consequences: Is a fetus a person? If a person's psychology has radically changed over time, is it still fair to hold her responsible for things she did long ago (maybe she's no longer the person who did whatever we want to hold her responsible for)?

Now, clearly, it's pointless to try to summarize even the most important ideas that you'll find in the readings collected here. There are too many positions, too many important arguments, and too many interesting issues to say much of importance about the anthology as a whole. But I will try to give you some sense of the contents here.

The first reading is from the seminal work on this topic, namely Locke's discussion in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. In a few justly famous thought experiments, Locke argues against the view that personal identity consists in identity of immaterial soul over time and the view that it consists in identity of body over time. He then proposes a version of the view that personal identity consists in the stages of a person sharing memories of previous stages. This is followed by more recent essays by Paul Grice and Anthony Quinton in which they defend views similar to Locke's. These two essays are responses to problems raised in the next two essays, both of which include classic objections to Locke's memory theory of personal identity. Joseph Butler argues that Locke's view begs the question since any accurate account of memories presupposes an account of personal identity. Thomas Reid argues that Locke's view fails to respect the transitivity of identity in some cases. And then there are two more readings querying the plausibility of the memory view, one by Sydney Shoemaker and one by Perry himself.

Then the anthology moves on from discussions of the memory view to other views about personal identity. The first alternate view is Hume's. In some famous material from his Treatise of Human Nature, he argues that there is no personal identity over time. Two of the remaining three papers argue for similar conclusions. Derek Parfit argues both that there may be no personal identity over time, and that identity isn't what matters through time. It is perfectly rational, he thinks, to care about the future of beings with psychologies similar to ours even if we aren't identical to them; and this is supposed to have important practical consequences. Thomas Nagel argues that our concept of a person main not apply in certain real-world cases of brain bisection, and he thinks that such cases may show that our concept of a person doesn't even apply to us in our normal condition. The final paper in the collection is by Bernard Williams. He argues that there seem to be cases in which bodily continuity is more important than psychological continuity.

While the reader should look elsewhere for the state of the art on the issues, I'd recommend this anthology to anyone interested in personal identity. Nearly all of these papers are classics that you ought to know if you're going to more recent work on this issue, and so it's still well worth buying even if you're more interested in contemporary thought about the topic.

Rating:
Summary: A Nice, Albeit Somewhat Outdated, Anthology
Review: This is a first-rate anthology on personal identity that includes important historical work and recent (up to the 70s) discussions of the relevant issues. It begins with an informative introduction by Perry. The introduction presents the basic problem and the way philosophers traditionally have thought about it. Then Perry gives a summary of most important points made in the historical material included in the anthology.

What is the question of personal identity? Basically, it's the question of what makes a person one and the same person through time. I assume I'm very same person I was two days ago, two months ago, two years ago, two decades ago, etc. Given that I've changed a great deal over that period of time, how could this be? It seems like I, the very person sitting here and typing this now, was once an undergraduate planning to go to grad school, once a high school student getting ready for college, once a elementary school kid, and once a newborn baby. But it's clear that I don't look or think a lot like those previous people who appear to be one and the same as I am. There's been a lot of physical and psychological change over time, and yet I think I'm the very same person I was at those various times. How could that be?

And this is a philosophical issue that seems to have practical ramifications. It appears to have consequences for how we understand ourselves and other people: Does a person survive radical amnesia? How about brain death? Could a person survive after bodily death? Could there be multiple people in the same body at the same time? If a person's memories, beliefs, desires, etc. change so that there's little or no connection to her previous self, is she really the same person at all anymore? Consequences for how we relate to people: If my friend suffers from amnesia and never recovers his prior memories, is he really still my friend (is he still the same person I knew before)? If my mother is dying from a disease that has left her little more than a body rotting away in a hospital bed, is she still really my mother (i.e. the same person who raised me)? And moral consequences: Is a fetus a person? If a person's psychology has radically changed over time, is it still fair to hold her responsible for things she did long ago (maybe she's no longer the person who did whatever we want to hold her responsible for)?

Now, clearly, it's pointless to try to summarize even the most important ideas that you'll find in the readings collected here. There are too many positions, too many important arguments, and too many interesting issues to say much of importance about the anthology as a whole. But I will try to give you some sense of the contents here.

The first reading is from the seminal work on this topic, namely Locke's discussion in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. In a few justly famous thought experiments, Locke argues against the view that personal identity consists in identity of immaterial soul over time and the view that it consists in identity of body over time. He then proposes a version of the view that personal identity consists in the stages of a person sharing memories of previous stages. This is followed by more recent essays by Paul Grice and Anthony Quinton in which they defend views similar to Locke's. These two essays are responses to problems raised in the next two essays, both of which include classic objections to Locke's memory theory of personal identity. Joseph Butler argues that Locke's view begs the question since any accurate account of memories presupposes an account of personal identity. Thomas Reid argues that Locke's view fails to respect the transitivity of identity in some cases. And then there are two more readings querying the plausibility of the memory view, one by Sydney Shoemaker and one by Perry himself.

Then the anthology moves on from discussions of the memory view to other views about personal identity. The first alternate view is Hume's. In some famous material from his Treatise of Human Nature, he argues that there is no personal identity over time. Two of the remaining three papers argue for similar conclusions. Derek Parfit argues both that there may be no personal identity over time, and that identity isn't what matters through time. It is perfectly rational, he thinks, to care about the future of beings with psychologies similar to ours even if we aren't identical to them; and this is supposed to have important practical consequences. Thomas Nagel argues that our concept of a person main not apply in certain real-world cases of brain bisection, and he thinks that such cases may show that our concept of a person doesn't even apply to us in our normal condition. The final paper in the collection is by Bernard Williams. He argues that there seem to be cases in which bodily continuity is more important than psychological continuity.

While the reader should look elsewhere for the state of the art on the issues, I'd recommend this anthology to anyone interested in personal identity. Nearly all of these papers are classics that you ought to know if you're going to more recent work on this issue, and so it's still well worth buying even if you're more interested in contemporary thought about the topic.

Rating:
Summary: Personal Identity, ed. John Perry
Review: This is a terrific collection of works on problems concerning personal identity (what are the criteria for personal identity? is personal identity presupposed by the criterion of memory? does personal identity matter?) including both historical pieces (Locke, Hume, Butler, Reid) and contemporary ones (Grice, Williams, Perry, Parfit.) It's a great introduction to the issues, but an introduction you'll not want to leave behind.