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‘Personal Identity and Imagination’:One Objection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Extract

P. T. Mackenzie's article is remarkable and challenging in several ways. It is, for instance, noteworthy that he reaches the surely correct conclusion that personal identity cannot be analysed in terms of memory without so much as entertaining Bishop Butler's terse and decisive objection to any such analysis: ‘… one should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 231 , January 1985 , pp. 123 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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References

1 Philosophy 58 (1983), 161-174.

2 W. E. Gladstone (ed.), The Works of Joseph Butler DCL, I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 388. The various changes on different interpretations of ‘consciousness’ and ‘memory’ were rung in my ‘Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity’, Philosophy 26 (1951), 53-68; reprinted, with revisions, in C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong (eds), Locke and Berkeley (New York, and London: Doubleday, and Macmiilan, 1968) and in B. Brody (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). This is the article which, in his Personal Identity (London: Macmiilan, 1974), Godfrey Vesey was so kind as to say ‘marks a turning point in the discussion of personal identity’ (p. 112).Google Scholar

3 This distinction, made most famously by Descartes in his Fifth Meditation with reference to a chiliagon, was developed by Annis Flew in ‘Images, Supposing and Imagining’, Philosophy 28 (1953), 246-254.

4 Op. cit. 168.

5 See, for instance, the Introduction to Antony Flew (ed.), Body, Mind and Death (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), and ‘Can a Man Witness his own Funeral?’, Hibbert Journal 55 (1956), 242-250. The second of these has been reprinted in J. Feinberg (ed.), Reason and Responsibility (Belmont, California: Dickenson, 1971), in W. J. Blackstone (ed.), Meaning and Existence (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1972), in F. A. Westphal (ed.), The Art of Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), in P. A. French (ed.), Philosophical Explorations (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1975), and, in a fairly drastically revised version, in my The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton/ Elek, 1976).Google Scholar

6 In Chapter 4 of Leviathan, for instance, he reproaches those who ‘make a name of two names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an incorporeal body, or (which is all one) an incorporeal substance, and a great number more.’

7 Compare my ‘The Identity of Incorporeal Persons’, in The Presumption of Atheism; also ‘Selves’, Mind 50 (1950), 242-246.

8 Franz, Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 7-63.Google Scholar

9 In addition to references already given, compare Terence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), especially Chapters 6-8.Google Scholar

10 The Schlick references, and the full arguments, can be found in ‘Can a Man Witness His Own Funeral?’, mentioned in note 5, above.