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Essay on personal identity for philosophy
Essay on personal identity for philosophy
Personal experience on identity
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Parfit argues that personal identity is not what matters. He states that whether a future person could be him depends on the inherited features between him and the other person and not what happens to the other person; and because personal identity is significant it cannot be determined by a trivial fact, therefore, personal identity is not what matters. Parfit believes that philosophers put too much importance on the idea of personal identity, when he argues that humanity cares more about survival. According to Parfit, we care more about the deaths of those who are psychologically continuous with ourselves. Therefore, I care that some person who is continuous to me continues to exist and that is how I survive. Parfit also uses the My Division case to argue that personal identity is nonconventional and does not matter. …show more content…
In contrast, his brother’s brains are damaged but their bodies are fine. Parfit splits his brain and transfers them to his two brothers who believe that they are Parfit and have lived their life as him. His identity is not preserved but his psychology is continuous because it is split into two people who exist as he did. We can put this into argument form. We can say that p is Parfit before he split his brain, q is Parfit’s brain in the left hemisphere of the brain, and r is Parfit’s brain in the right hemisphere of the brain. If P=Q and P=R, then we can conclude that Q=R. However, this can’t be true as Q and R have Parfit’s brain located in different areas. But because P equals both Q and R we can conclude that Q and R are psychological continues of P. Therefore, as said earlier we tend to care about the deaths of those who exist continuous with ourselves because preserving yourself is the key to Parfit’s
Derek Parfit, one of the most important defender of Hume, addresses the puzzle of the non-identity problem. Parfit claims that there is no self. This statement argues against the Ego Theory, which claims that beneath experience, a subject or self exists. Ego Theorists claims that the unity of a person’s whole life including life experiences is also known as the Cartesian view, which claims that each person is a “persisting purely mental thing.” Parfit uses the Split-Brain Case, which tells us something interesting about personal identity, to invalidate the Ego Theory. During the Split Brain procedure, there are neither ‘persons’ nor ‘persons’ before the brain was split. Within the experiment, the patient has control of their arms, and sees what is in half of their visual fields with only one of their hemispheres. However, when the right and left hemisphere disconnect, the patient is able to receive two different written questions targeted to the two halves of their visual field; thus, per hand, they write two different answers. In a split brain case, there are two streams of consciousness and Parfit claims that the number of persons involved is none. The scenario involves the disconnection of hemispheres in the brain. The patient is then placed in front of a screen where the left half of a screen is red and the right half is blue. When the color is shown to one hemisphere and the patient is asked, “How many colors do you see,” the patient, with both hands, will write only one color. But when colors are shown to both sides of the hemisphere, the patient with one hand writes red and the other writes blue.
Parfit’s view on the nature of persisting persons raises interesting issues in terms of identity. Though there are identifiable objections to his views, I am in favor of the argument he develops. This paper will layout Parfit’s view on that nature of persisting person, show support as well as argue the objections to the theory. In Derek Parfit’s paper Personal Identity, Parfit provides a valid account of persisting persons through time through his clear account of psychological continuities. He calls people to accept the argument that people persist through time but people do not persist or survive by way of identity.
Hume, David. "Of Personal Identity." Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy. Ed. G. Lee Bowie, Meredith W. Michaels and Robert C. Solomon. 4th ed. Harcourt College Publishers, 2000. 348-352
Although the concept of identity is recurrent in our daily lives, it has interpreted in various ways.
Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010). Parfit aims to defend the following two claims about personal identity:
Weirob is wright to claim that personal identity cannot consist in the sameness of an immaterial, unobservable soul. (In Perry’s dialogue on personal mortality)
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
People go through many obstacles when they face their social identity. Some can overcome their differences, but others may not have they change to even face them due to the treatment that they get from society. Social identity is the one of many controversial and complex problems that many individuals deal with. Because, sometimes it used to be misunderstood making reference to racism and/or others complex matters. “On Being a Cripple” and “How It Feels to Be Colored” are two essays in which both characters suffer from some kind of discrimination. Indeed, in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston and “On Being a Cripple” by Nancy Mairs, each author shows different attitude, endures challenges, and change toward social identity.
Parfit defines fission as a process of transferring part of an individual’s brain into another body while the other half of the brain is kept alive and put in another body. He suggests that when this process takes place, an occurrence of three possibilities may take place: an individual may not survive; and individual may survive as one of the two individuals in two different bodies; or an individual may survive as both “in that the individual has two bodies and a mind that is divided” (Loux 375). Parfit thinks that each of these three possibilities should be rejected. Moreover, he wants to refute that for any question concerning the survival of personal identity in the fission process, there should
Many philosophers and psychologist from Jean Piaget to William James have theorized what makes a person who they are, their identity. Jean Piaget believed that the identity is formed in the sensorimotor stage and the preoperational stage. This means that a child is forming his identity as late to the age of seven (Schellenberg, 29) However, identity is strongly impacted by society such as school, church, government,and other institutions. Through our interactions with different situations our personality develops (Schellenberg 34). "In most situations there is a more diversified opportunity for the development of social identities, reflecting what the individual wants to put forth to define the self as well as what others want to accept,"(Schellenberg 35). Therefore, humans, much like animals, adapt to different situations based on who they are with. Individuals are always changi...
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
Personal identity examines what makes a person at one time identical with a person at another. Many philosophers believe we are always changing and therefore, we cannot have a persisting identity if we are different from one moment to the next. However, many philosophers believe there is some important feature that determines a person’s identity and keeps it persistent. For John Locke, this important feature is memory, and I agree. Memory is the most important feature in determining a person’s identity as memory is the necessary and sufficient condition of personal identity.
This hypothesis proposes that our identity is not a steady trademark. Furthermore, it can always show signs of change because of the general population we are around and associate with. Our identity likewise changes because of the progressions id social circumstances.
Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reveals one of life’s most relevant purposes that stretches across cultures and relates to every aspect of enlightenment. The novel examines the life of the strong-willed Janie Crawford, as she goes down the path of self-discovery by way of her past relationships. Ideas regarding the path of liberation date all the way back to the teachings of Siddhartha. Yet, its concept is still recycled in the twenty-first century, as it inspires all humanity to look beyond the “horizon,” as Janie explains. Self-identification, or self-fulfillment, is a theme that persists throughout the book, remaining a quest for Janie Crawford to discover, from the time she begins to tell the story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. Hurston makes a point at the beginning of the novel to separate the male and female identities from one another. This is important for the reader to note. The theme for identity, as it relates to Janie, carefully unfolds as the story goes on to expand the depths of the female interior.
In his book, he addresses the questions of “What makes a person at two different times one and the same person? What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of each person over time?” (Parfit 1984:202)