Personal Identity: Volume 22, Part 2

The essays in this volume, first published in 2005, offer valuable insights into personal identity and its implications for morality and public policy.

Ellen Frankel Paul (Edited by), Fred D. Miller, Jr (Edited by), Jeffrey Paul (Edited by)

9780521617673, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 July 2005

404 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 2.3 cm, 0.561 kg

What is a person? What makes me the same person today that I was yesterday or will be tomorrow? Philosophers have long pondered these questions. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates observed that all of us are constantly undergoing change: we experience physical changes to our bodies, as well as changes in our 'manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, [and] fears'. Aristotle theorized that there must be some underlying 'substratum' that remains the same even as we undergo these changes. John Locke rejected Aristotle's view and reformulated the problem of personal identity in his own way: is a person a physical organism that persists through time, or is a person identified by the persistence of psychological states, by memory? These essays - written by prominent philosophers and legal and economic theorists - offer valuable insights into the nature of personal identity and its implications for morality and public policy.

Introduction
Acknowledgments
Contributors
1. Experience, agency, and personal identity Marya Schechtman
2. When does a person begin? Lynne Rudder Baker
3. Persons, social agency, and constitution Robert A. Wilson
4. Hylemorphic dualism David S. Oderberg
5. Personal identity and self-ownership Edward Feser
6. Self-conception and personal identity: revisiting Parfit and Lewis with an eye on the grip of the unity reaction Marvin Belzer
7. The normativity of self-grounded reason David Copp
8. Rationality means being willing to say you're sorry Jennifer Roback Morse
9. Personal identity and postmortem survival Stephen E. Braude
10. 'The thing I am': personal identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare John Finnis
11. Moral status and personal identity: clones, embryos, and future generations F. M. Kamm
12. The identity of identity: moral and legal aspects of technological self-transformation Michael H. Shapiro.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Political science & theory [JPA], Social & political philosophy [HPS], History of Western philosophy [HPC]