The following observation arose in the course of a critique of philosopher Derek Parfit. "Even if the lower-level facts [that make up identity] do not in themselves matter, the higher-level fact may matter. If it does, the lower-level facts will have derived significance. They will matter, not in themselves, but because they constitute the higher level fact." The quote is from Mark Johnstone, as part of a critique he wrote of Parfit's work on personal identity for a collection called DEREK PARFIT AND HIS CRITICS. Parfit didn't believe in personal identity. That is, he didn't believe there is any important sense aside from social convention why an "I" of 15 years old is the same person as an "I" of 45, thirty years later, however firmly the latter has memories that might be traced ultimately to the sensory organs of the former. Parfit can perhaps best be understood as bringing into the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradi...
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https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl That is the cliched "School of Athens" image for a discussion of philosophers, followed by a link to the complete set of questions and data of the survey I excerpted from yesterday. What strikes me is that there are some questions on which nothing remotely approaching consensus exists -- there are almost as many "nominalists" (or those leaning that way) as there are "Platonists," and a sizeable though smaller proportion of "other." Likewise on normative ethics "other" is dominant, yet even that catch-all category is a minority. The Big Two -- deontology and teleology -- are closely split for second/third. Personal identity, too, is a matter of very sharp split, and a matter where "other" wins. Fortunately, the results page (link above) lets one get more granular on "other" when one has a mind to. The most popular "other" answer for Personal Identity is ...
On December18th I posted here a discussion of Galen Strawson's 2011 book, THE EVIDENT CONNEXION: HUME ON PERSONAL IDENTITY. I promised then that I would come back to the subject. The very short version is this. Hume understands personal identity to depend on the mind. It can't depend on the brain, or the body generally, because for Hume our knowledge of enduring physical objects is quite limited -- we know bundles of sensations that act together with regularity. So personal identity depends on the mind, and Humean philosophy needs an active (to some extent an enduring) mind to do the work of generating "fictions" (in some sense) about enduring physical objects and causal relations among them. But when Hume tries to analyze the mind and what we know of it, it too rather crumbles in his hands. He finds that he could make sense of the knowing mind only if he believed either in a soul or in a strong knowable connection of cause and effect. Hume rej...