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.

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