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Personal Identity and the Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Bernard Gert
Bernard Gert
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

I see someone who looks vaguely familiar. I wonder if he could be the same person I had a fight with on my birthday ten years ago. I hear that some scientist has received the Nobel prize in chemistry for some work very similar to that which interested the brightest boy in my chemistry class twenty years ago. I wonder if that scientist and the brightest boy might be the same person. What facts, if they could be discovered, would be decisive in answering these questions? Are there any facts that, if it turns out that they do not obtain, would show conclusively that the two people are not the same person? That is, are there any necessary conditions for personal identity? Are there any facts that, if it turns out that they do obtain, would show conclusively that the two people are the same person? That is, are there any sufficient conditions for personal identity?

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 458 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1971

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References

1 Terence Penelhum may be an exception. See his article “Personal Identity” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. VI, pp. 95–107.Google Scholar

2 Aristotelian Society Proceedings, New Series, Vol. LVIII, 1956-1957, p. 229.

3 Ibid.

4 “The Soul”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LIX (July 19, 1962).

5 “Persons and Their Bodies”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, (January, 1966).Google Scholar

6 Individuals, An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London, 1959 (Methuen & Co., Ltd.)Google Scholar

7 The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, 1963, (St. Martins Press).Google Scholar

8 Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, Ithaca, New York, 1963 (Cornell University Press).Google Scholar

9 Individuals, P. 133. Cf. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 404.

10 P. 133

11 P. 115.

12 p. 126.

13 P. 127.

14 P. 128.

15 Quinton and Shaffer use a brain transfer example for similar purposes.

16 Pp. 23ff. I am also indebted to Shoemaker for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

17 There are some problems here. See Mann, Thomas, The Transposed Heads, A Legend of India, New York, 1941, (Alfred A. Knopf). Translated by Lowe-Porter, H. T..Google Scholar

18 P. 24.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 P. 25.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 It might be that we would alter our present concept of personal identity by regarding them both as identical with Mr. Brown, though, of course, they would not be identical with each other. This kind of case would seem to arise more plausibly if the two hemispheres of the brain were separated, each one going into a brainless body. If, in this case, both bodies exhibited identical psychological features insofar as these are dependent on the past, e.g., memory and character traits, they would have equal right to claim to be Brown. Someone coming into the room asking, “Which of you is Mr. Brown?” might receive the answer, “We both are”, even after it had been established that he was asking about one particular Mr. Brown. Thus, in saying of two people that they have the same past we would have to distinguish, as we do not now have to do, whether we meant a qualitatively similar past or a numerically identical one. This would mean a change in our present concept of personal identity for it would destroy the transitivity which is an essential part of our present concept.

25 Note that this presupposes that it is the same part(s) of the body that is intimately connected with one's psychological features in every man. Part of the oddity of the case in which both Robin and Brownson have Brown's psychological features is the result of its contradiction of this presupposition. A child is not the same person as either of his parents even though he contains parts of both of their bodies, viz., a sperm and an ovum, because the loss of these parts of the body does not affect in any way the identity of the parents.

26 I have shown that it is logically possible for a brain, having been completely separated from the rest of the body, to continue to have psychological features. See “Can a Brain Have a Pain?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1967, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, pp. 432-436. “Dr. Robert J. White of Western Reserve, in Cleveland, has already achieved partial transplants in dogs.” Newsweek, December 18, 1967, p. 90.

27 There is a murder mystery, Choice Cuts, by Thomas Boileau and Pierre Narcejec, New York, 1966 (E. P. Dutton), translated from the French by Brian Rawson, in which doubt about which part of the body this is plays a crucial role. See also Newsweek, December 18, 1967, p. 87, last paragraph.

28 The problem of determining who is responsible for Brown's actions is a much more complex matter. I have distinguished very sharply between the problems of personal identity and those of personal responsibility. In this paper I have been concerned solely with the former.

29 None of the philosophers mentioned discuss the possibility of a person planning to change bodies, It is a crucial oversight. Consider our reaction to someone who sought to escape justified punishment by changing bodies.

30 P. 245.

31 Ibid.

32 This is, I think, Wittgenstein's use of “criterion.”

33 This may explain why resurrection of the body is a more intelligible concept than immortality of the soul. The former only involves the belief that death, rather than causing the body to lose all of its psychological features permanently, causes the body to lose them only temporarily, though perhaps for a very long time. However, the latter, unless the soul is conceived as a kind of body (the original conception of it) seems to involve conceptual confusions, viz., that one's psychological features can exist independently, not only of one's original body, but of any body at all.

34 I have benefited from discussion of this paper at Dartmouth College, The University of Edinburgh, The Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, The University of Maryland, Queen's University, and Brown University. I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for providing me with the time to prepare the final version of this paper.