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A Mind of One's Own

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

J. R. Lucas
J. R. Lucas
Affiliation:
Merton College, Oxford
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Extract

Whatever good or ill it did to Guy Fawkes, his resuscitation at the hands of Bernard Williams has, by any utilitarian reckoning, been a Good Thing. A casual glance at the literature that has accumulated over the past thirty-five years leaves no doubt that the topic has been reduplicated many times over, to the great enjoyment of undergraduates, who have been able to write science fiction under the guise of essays in the Philosophy of Mind, and of dons, who in an age of cvs and Assessments, have been able to notch up page after page of counter-replies to replies to rebuttals of previous papers, not to mention an often welcome tally of references in the citation index. But the actual arguments adduced by Williams can be turned to support a much more traditional view of the self, as a necessarily unique agent whose individuality is established by his capacity for autonomous action.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 266 , October 1993 , pp. 457 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

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7 Admittedly, Foster, among others, offers an account of the unity of the stream of consciousness without any explicit reference to decision-making, but I am unpersuaded of its success. See his ‘In Self-Defence’, in Macdonald, G. F., (ed.), Perception and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1979), 175–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10 A paper given to the Oxford Philosophical Society, 20 February, 1992.