Skip to main content

RIP Sydney Shoemaker

 


Sydney Shoemaker died recently. A philosopher affiliated with Cornell University, Shoemaker was an important figure in the continuing debates about personal identity. He sided with John Locke (and William James) in tying personal identity closely to memory. 

He began an essay on the subject with these words, "Persons have, in memory, a special access to facts about their own past histories and their own identities, a kind of access they do not have to the histories and identities of other persons and other things." 

That proposition is a step toward the broader view that such access, for most people most of the time, simply IS identity.

John Locke was the first important philosopher to put forward that view of a self. The importance of Locke's advocacy of it was that it was an immanentist view. It saw identity as something quite this-worldly, and not as a transcendental soul. 

By way of clarification, consider that I (a man in his early 60s) may not remember anything that I felt or thought when I was five. But I now remember, and have as Shoemaker would say a privileged access to, quite a number of things that I felt or thought when I was 40. And I then remembered things I had felt and thought when I was 20. And THAT fellow had access to a lot of things he felt when he was just 10. And so on backwards to babbling infancy, with its blooming buzzing confusion out of which all else has been built. 

So (1) memory secures identity and (2) a continuous chain of this sort persuaded most of us that we have been one self over as many decades as we have had. 

If the chain were broken, in what psychologists call a fugue state, then identity may fail, even if the body remained the same. 

At any rate: farewell, Prof Shoemaker. The world has lost the one person with privileged access to the origin story of that important essay. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more