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Disembodied Survival Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1975

Richard L. Purtill*
Affiliation:
Western Washington State College

Extract

In a recent paper, I challenged a currently fashionable argument against the intelligibility of disembodied survival. This argument urges that only bodily continuity can provide a satisfactory criterion for personal identity and since bodily continuity is, of course, ruled out ex hypothesi in disembodied survival, we could have no satisfactory criterion for identity of a disembodied person. Toward the end of the paper I issued a challenge to supporters of this argument; if there are reasonable standards for a criterion of personal identity which do not beg the question in favor of the bodily continuity criterion, let them be stated and let us see if other criteria of personal identity can meet them as well as bodily continuity.

The recent republication of a number of early papers by Bernard Williams has drawn my attention to a paper by Williams which may seem to anticipate and answer this challenge. In what follows I wish to see whether or not this is so; whether Williams has given standards for a criterion of personal identity which are reasonable, which bodily continuity can meet, and which other criteria (such as those proposed in my earlier paper) cannot meet.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

1 “Disembodied Survival”, Sophia, Vol. XII, no. 2, july 1973.

2 In Williams, Bernard Problems of the Self, Cambridge U. P., 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Originally entitled “Personal Identity and Bodily Continuity —a Reply”, Analysis XXI (1960); retitled “Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity,” in Williams, op. cit., pp. 19–25.

4 The principle sometimes called “Strict Implication of Possibles”, . This does not hold for material implication.