Lecture 14
Date given: Wednesday 25th November 2020
This is the main page for Lecture 14. I have also put backup recordings here. Or, if you prefer, you can see the slides with no audio or video here.
Biological Continuity
According to biological continuity views of personal identity, necessarily, a person existing at one time is a thing existing at another time if and only if the first mentioned person’s biological organism is continuous with the second thing’s biological organism.
Reading (optional): Olson, E. T. (1997). The human animal: Personal identity without psychology. Oxford Uni- versity Press, Oxford.
Does Identity Matter?
If ‘the relations of practical concerns that typically go along with our identity through time are closely connected with psychological continuity [...], then the Biological Approach does have an interesting ethical consequence, namely that those practical relations are not necessarily connected with numerical identity’ (Olson, 1997 p. 70).
Reading (optional): Olson, E. T. (1997). The human animal: Personal identity without psychology. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Psychological Continuity and Fission
If you could be psychologically continuous with two distinct future individuals (that is, if fission is possible), then psychological continuity views of personal identity cannot be correct.
Reading (optional): Shoemaker, D. (2019). Personal Identity and Ethics. In Zalta, E. N., editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, winter 2019 edition.
Conclusion
Lewis was right, ‘Identity is utterly simple and unproblematic’. Or so I claim. But maybe you can show this is wrong.
Reading (optional): (hard) Sider, T. (2001). Criteria of Personal Identity and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis. Nouˆs, 35(s15):189–209
Other lectures
- Lecture 01
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- Lecture 10
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- Lecture 13
- Lecture 15
- Lecture 16
- Lecture 17
- Lecture 18
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