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Philosophy of death essay
Philosophy of death essay
Personal identity and Self Identity
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In “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” John Perry conveys conversations between a philosopher and her two friends a few nights before she dies. We then come to how the dying philosopher is trying to have everyone convince her that she will survive even after her body dies. In this John Perry claims that there are three ways of deliberating personal identity: bodily identity, psychological continuity and immaterial soul. The essay then describes the different types of identity and how they can use them to prove to the perishing philosopher that she can still remain alive. I will argue that the only way we can distinguish personal identity is through psychological continuity and how we can determine a person based on their memories and experiences. From this we can go into discussion about some terms that will be used throughout this paper.
For the purposes of this paper I will be defining personality and psychological continuity and personal identity. Personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. It means that personality is what we can use to help define a person as him or herself. Another term that will be vastly used is psychological continuity. Psychological continuity is when one person’s psychological states are continuous such as their memories, experience, and personality. Finally personal identity is how a person thinks or defines him or herself in this world.
In order to show that the best account of identity is psychological continuity I present the following argument:
P1. The best account of personal identity is either psychological continuity, bodily identity, or the immaterial soul.
P2. The best account of personal identity is not bodi...
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...rk and focus on the birds. In general these two people could have similar experiences but they would look at them differently and because of how they view their experience differently is how we can tell they are different people.
I have shown throughout this essay that we can determine personal identity solely based on psychological continuity. During John Perry’s dialogue he says that there are only three ways in which we can tell a person is who they are. Those three ideas being a person is their body, a person has a continuation of memory, or a person is their immaterial soul. Through the whole of this essay we have discussed that even though bodily identity and immaterial souls are a good suggestions for determining personal identity that they really aren’t logical theories. I have argued that we can distinguish personal identity from psychological continuity.
In John Perry’s “dialogue on personal identity and immorality”, Dave Cohen and Sam Miller visit Gretchen Weirob in the hospital because of Weirob’s injury in a motorcycle accident, they raise a discussion on personal identity. Cohen later takes up issues raised in the case where Julia’s brain is taken from her deteriorated body and placed on the healthy body of Mary whose brain has been destroyed. Therefore Mary has her own body with Julia’s memory and personality. The case proposes an argument
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.
In this essay I am going to be discussingthe question of the persistence ofpersonal identity. Particularly, defending the theory that I think is the best. Therearethreemajor competing theoriesthat are brought upwhen it comes to personal identity. They are the brute-physical, psychological-continuity, and the antichriterialist view. Here,I will be defending the psychological-continuity view because I think this theorybest explains what we call personhood; and I think it gives the most satisfactoryanswer to the question.The psychological continuity theory states that what makes a certain individual who they are is their psychological state (i.e. memories, mental functions); and these mental functions are a product of a functioning physical organ
This essay has covered the concept of practical identities and their unique characteristic of contingency as well as the foundation of all value in our actions that all rational beings have- moral identity. Reflecting on these ideas, one can relate to the conception of practical identities or moral identity. However, the suggestion of their contingency or non-contingency and their importance in one’s life is questionable. One is led to wonder what the real source of value in one’s action is and the real weight of practical and moral identities in one’s
In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. 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).
Personal identity is an important idea that permeates through life by influencing ideas, determining actions, and in some cases preceding the physical self. Personal identity influences choices in daily life, while also containing identity data that is important to those one will interact with, allowing others to make choices based upon that information. While the additional information contained within the impacts of an identity isn’t personal identity by itself, it is surely part of how personal identity is defined. In his essay “The Unimportance of Identity”, Derek Parfit argues that it is not personal identity that is important when considering the future, but survival. The intention of this writing is to outline the arguments from Parfit’s essay, and reveal that Derek Parfit’s definition and idea of personal identity in “The Unimportance of Identity” are incomplete. By completely defining personal identity, the soundness of the arguments presented in his writing will be disrupted and personal identity will be seen as a worthwhile consideration for the continuation of a person.
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
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:
Chapter twenty-six on “Identity and Diversity” has been said to be one of the most first modern concepts in which consciousness is a repeated self-identification of oneself. Within this Locke gives his account of identity and personal identity, by stating that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity.
Self-identity is singular. The belief in this existence of one’s self, presupposes all our experiences of consciousness. We all hold that this identity is ours alone. I speak of my experiences as experienced by me. I would seem to be talking nonsense , if I referred to myself in the plural or spoke of how the multiplicity of ‘me’s’ experienced an event. Although most will submit to the existence of levels of consciousness, we categorize those people who exhibit distinct personalities as non-ordinary. All popular theories of self-identity set about the task of proving a singular self. I will attempt to analyze the currently held theories of self-identity, and consider cases where the singular self-identity of normal individuals is called into questi on. Psychologists seeking to clarify this discussion have researched phenomena concerning the nature of self-identity, and it’s relation with consciousness. Philosophers can attempt to investigate the fundamental assumptions underlying these studies, an d examine their ramifications upon our dogmas of self-identity.
Personal identity is a very controversial aspect of life. Who are we? What defines us? According to John Locke, psychological continuity is what defines our personal identity. Locke discusses the case of the prince and the cobbler to help shape his theory. However, I absolutely disagree with Locke’s theory. Locke’s theory of personal identity creates many problems, such as the duplication problem. By reformulating Locke’s theory of personal identity, we still come across these problems that prove Locke’s theory false.
One major critic of Locke’s account is Antony Flew who offers two objections in his article “Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity”. The first objection, which he attributes to Bishop Butler, suggests that by defining personal identity in terms of consciousness Locke has in effect created a circular argument. The second objection concludes that “Locke’s criterion is at the same time both too strict in blackballing and too lenient in admitting candidates.” Although I contend that both objections are flawed, the scope of this paper shall only be to evaluate and respond to the first of these objections.
According to this theory, what the character faces and feels shapes whom they become, and the process of identity is continuous throughout the character’s life. This is demonstrated in The Epic of Gilgamesh as Gilgamesh struggles with his own identity in considering Enkidu, a man of the wild, as an equal. It is also apparent when Gilgamesh confronts his own mortality when witnessing Enkidu’s demise. In The Tempest, Caliban is defiant and wishes to hold fast to his identity although Prospero attempts to colonize him. This idea of evolving throughout experiences to discover one is particularly fascinating to me, and that is precisely why I chose to explore the identity lens
Personal identity is the concept of what makes a unique person, what ‘self’ means, and what connects you to other versions of yourself. It is generally accepted that personal identity exists and that everyone is a unique and distinct being. The more interesting and complicated philosophical problem has to do with personal identity over time, which considers two beings over time: being X, at time T1, and being Y, at time T2. The most important aspect being the specific conditions which do or do not make X and Y the same person. Persisting things can change their intrinsic properties without abandoning their identities as those persisting things. This is not hard to accept since it would be absurd to believe that every time something changed,