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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2020
In recent years work on the topic of personal identity has flourished. Much of it is ingenious and some of it is quite dazzling. Despite the brilliance of the literature, however, the topic itself continues to be wrapped in darkness and its capacity to baffle and perplex is as great as ever. In the present paper, I will attempt to make clear that and why this is so. I shall begin by showing why the most recent virtuoso performance in the area leaves everything as obscure as before. I shall then develop a version of what appears to me to be the most viable alternative to both the bankrupt view just unmasked and its equally bankrupt congeners, and indicate why it too is less than fully satisfactory. The upshot will be that we seem to be faced with three possible conclusions, each moderately compelling, but none obviously correct or altogether happy.
1 Nozick, R. Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1981)Google Scholar
2 See Nozick, 1-24, especially 23 f.
3 Ibid., 47
4 Ibid., 51, 58 and 67 f.
5 Ibid., 69; see also 106 f.
6 This condition is problematic. On 40 (ibid.) it is suggested as a mere possibility. However, on 62 (ibid.) Nozick appears to embrace it (see the first full paragraph, second sentence).
7 Ibid., 47
8 Ibid., 51. In this and the previous quotation from 47 (n. 7), I have changed the letters Nozick uses as variables in order to conform to my earlier usage.
9 See ibid., 33 f., 37 ff., and the note on 58 f.
10 See ibid., 36 f.
11 See ibid., 60 f.
12 See ibid., 62 ff. and 110
13 Ibid., 107
14 Presumably there will be no fact of the matter whether the person in question is George if there is another sufficiently close continuer of George elsewhere in the galaxy who uses a different measure of closeness than does the person in question - a measure such that on it the distant person is George and the person in question isn't.
15 See Parfit, D. ‘Personal Identity,’ The Philosophical Review, 80 (1971),CrossRefGoogle Scholar 4 f.
16 See Nozick, 40. One cannot help wondering if this lack of surety is to be taken as evidence that Nozick is not, on his view, a determinate person, owing to vagueness in his measure of closeness.
17 Ibid., 41. I should note that Nozick also considers under this heading cases in which the molecules of the decomposed body are beamed to the distant place and there re-assembled.
18 Cf. Parfit, ‘Personal Identity,’ 5
19 Nozick, 44
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 45
23 I have in mind analyses like those suggested recently by Shoemaker, S. in ‘Identity, Properties, and Causality,’ in P. French et a!., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IV: Studies in Metaphysics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1979) 321–42;Google Scholar Perry, J. in ‘The Importance of Being Identical’ in Rorty, A. ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976) 67–90;Google Scholar and D. Parfit, ‘Personal Identity.’
24 See Duncan-Jones, A. ‘Man's Mortality,’ Analysis, 28 (1968) 65–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 See Parfit, ‘Personal Identity’ and ‘Later Selves and Moral Principles,’ in Montefiore, A. ed., Philospophy and Personal Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973) 137–69Google Scholar - especially secs. I and II.
26 In the sense ‘criterial’ has here, a condition is criteria! for the truth of a judgment provided knowledge that it holds is good reason for thinking the judgment in question true.
27 See Perry, sec. V. The general line of thought in this paragraph obviously owes much to Perry's discussion - despite moving counter to its general tenor.
28 See Parfit, ‘Personal Identity,’ 4 ff.
29 See, for example, Chomsky, N. Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fodor, J. Representations (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1981)Google Scholar -especially chap. 10 (The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy’).
30 D. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. XII, part II (last paragraph)
31 Aristotle, Nichomachaen Ethics, 16, 1096a 14–15Google Scholar
32 Broad, C.D. The Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1925), 186Google Scholar