Personal Identity and Immortality
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Curriculum Vitae John R. Perry Email: [email protected] Born: 16 January 1943 in Lincoln, Nebraska Address: 545 Hilbar Lane
Curriculum Vitae John R. Perry Email: [email protected] Born: 16 January 1943 in Lincoln, Nebraska Address: 545 Hilbar Lane, Palo Alto, CA 94303 Websites: http://www.john.jperry.net http://www-csli.stanford.edu/groups/center-explanation-consciousness http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ http://www.philosophytalk.org/ Education 1968 Ph.D., Philosophy, Cornell University 1964 B.A., Philosophy, Doane College Appointments Spring, 2015 Visiting Professor, University of California, Berkeley 2014-- Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside 2009 --2014 Distinguished Professor (50%), University of California, Riverside. 2009-- Professor Emeritus, Stanford (recalled halftime through 2010-11) 2000-2001 Chair, Department of Philosophy 1993–99 Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information 1990–1991 Chair, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University 1985– 2008 Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University 1985–1986 Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information 1977– 2008 Full Professor, Philosophy, Stanford University 1976–1982 Chair, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University 1974–1977 Associate Professor, Philosophy, Stanford University 1972–1974 Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles 1971–1972 Visiting Assistant Professor, Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1968–1972 Assistant Professor, Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles Fellowships, Honors, Recent Lectures 2014 Romanell Lecturer, American Philosophical Association -
In the “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” John Perry Presents The
1 Faith and Philosophy, April (2006), 191-200. Penultimate Draft DE SE KNOWLEDGE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OMNISCIENT BEING Stephan Torre In this paper I examine an argument that has been made by Patrick Grim for the claim that de se knowledge is incompatible with the existence of an omniscient being. I claim that the success of the argument depends upon whether it is possible for someone else to know what I know in knowing (F), where (F) is a claim involving de se knowledge. I discuss one reply to this argument, proposed by Edward Wierenga, that appeals to first-person propositions and argue that this response is unsuccessful. I then consider David Lewis‟s theory of de se attitudes involving the self-ascription of properties. I claim that, according to this theory, there are two senses in which someone else can know what I know in knowing (F). I then argue that the second sense allows for the compatibility of de se knowledge with the existence of an omniscient being. Consider the following case:1 I am at a pool party and around the pool are several burning torches. At some point, I smell the distinct smell of burning hair and I come to know that someone‟s hair is on fire. I then see a reflection in the water of an individual whose hair is on fire and I come to know of this individual that his hair is on fire. Next I realize that everyone is pointing and shouting at me. I suddenly realize: (F) My hair is on fire! 1 2 When I come to realize (F), my behavior changes drastically; I jump into the pool in order to extinguish the flames. -
Introduction to Philosophy Philosophy 1000, Spring 2017
INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY 1000, SPRING 2017 SECTION 001 MWF, 10:00, VAC 1B90 INSTRUCTOR Jonathan Spelman [email protected] https://www.chalkup.co/course/585dcc64281f930800a658cb/trending COURSE DESCRIPTION This course introduces students to some of the central questions in philosophy and identifies some potential answers to them. For example, we consider epistemological questions such as whether we can trust our senses and, more generally, whether we can know anything. We consider metaphysical questions such as whether God exists and whether we could survive the death of our bodies. Finally, we consider normative questions such as whether we have a moral obligation to donate money to famine relief and whether it is morally wrong to buy and eat factory-farmed meat, pollute the environment, and/or play violent video games. Along the way, this course helps students develop the philosophical skills they need to answer these questions. In particular, it helps students to construct and evaluate arguments, devise thought experiments and counterexamples, and develop intellectual courage, empathy, and humility. OFFICE HOURS I will hold office hours on Mondays from 11:00a-12:45p and Wednesdays from 2:00p-3:45p in Hellems 15. I am also available by appointment. REQUIRED TEXTS • Course Pack • John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Hackett, 1978. • René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy, translated by Donald A. Cress, 4th ed., Hackett, 1999. TECHNOLOGY POLICY Studies show that students who write their notes retain more information than those who type their notes (see, for example, http://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-put- your-laptops-away). -
The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein
Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts - Volume 8, Issue 2, April 2021 – Pages 107-136 The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein By Richard McDonough* Cognitive science, the attempt to provide an account of human intelligence and behavior by reference to physical ‚mechanisms‛ in the alleged neural control center of human beings, is one of the dominant philosophical projects of our time. The paper argues that Wittgenstein in para. 608 of Zettel develops an alternative to this almost universally accepted modern paradigm. However, his efforts have been widely misunderstood, in a fashion clarified by Kuhn, because scholars read competing paradigms in the light of their own cognitive science paradigm. In the present case, scholars have assumed that the words in Zettel (para. 608), especially ‚the center‛ and ‚chaos,‛ must have the same meanings that they would naturally be assigned in cognitive science. The result is, inevitably, that Zettel (para. 608) either looks like it anticipates one of the various cognitive science paradigms or it looks absurd. In opposition to this, the paper argues that the language in Zettel (para. 608) is not the language of modern cognitive science, but, rather, is the language of the emergence of order from chaos by virtue of a stabilizing center with which the Western intellectual tradition began in ancient Greek cosmology. When read against this background, it becomes clear that Zettel (para. 608) is an attempt to formulates an alternative to the cognitive science paradigm by retrieving a paradigm found in ancient Greek philosophy and literature. The idea that the brain is not the control center of the human organism is in Plato. -
Sydney Shoemaker A
Eric T. Olson Churchill College Cambridge What does Functionalism Tell Us about Personal Identity? abstract: Sydney Shoemaker argues that the functionalist theory of mind entails a psychological-continuity view of personal identity, as well as providing a defense of that view against a crucial objection. I show that his view has surprising consequences, e.g. that no organism could have mental properties and that a thing's mental properties fail to supervene even weakly on its microstructure and surroundings. I then argue that the view founders on "fission" cases and rules out our being material things. Functionalism tells us little if anything about personal identity. 1. Most philosophers believe that our identity through time consists in some sort of psychological continuity. You are, necessarily, that future being who in some sense inherits his mental features from you: the one who has the mental features he has then in large part because you have the mental features you have now. And you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited. Though there is dispute about what sort of "inheritance" counts--about whether those features must be continuously physically realized, for instance--most agree that some sort of mental continuity is necessary or sufficient (or both) for us to persist. So magnetic is this view that many feel entitled to assert it without argument. Such arguments as we find typically amount to little more than telling science-fiction stories and remarking that most of us (Western philosophy teachers and their students) are inclined to think that the character at the end of the story is identical with the character at the beginning of the story with whom he is psychologically continuous. -
Identity and Self-Knowledge
Philos Theor Pract Biol (2017) 9:5 special issue Identity and Self-Knowledge John Perry∗ Self, person, and identity are among the concepts most central to the way humans think about themselves and others. It is often natural in biology to use such concepts; it seems sensible to say, for example, that the job of the immune system is to attack the non-self, but sometimes it attacks the self. But does it make sense to borrow these concepts? Don’t they only pertain to persons, beings with sophisticated minds, and perhaps even souls? I argue that if we focus on the every-day concepts of self and identity, and set aside loftier concepts found in religion, philosophy, and psychology that are applicable, at most, to humans, we can see that self and identity can be sensibly applied widely in biology. Keywords self • self-knowledge • identity • person • personal identity • unity-relation • process philosophy Part of a special issue, Ontologies of Living Beings, guest-edited by A. M. Ferner and Thomas Pradeu Editorial introduction: John Perry works primarily in logic, metaphysics and the philos- ophy of mind—and this essay is a contribution to a sub-field in the latter: self-knowledge. How do we have, and how do we understand, knowledge of ourselves and of our own men- tal states? While initially this might seem quite far removed from the focus of this special issue, there are two important reasons for including his piece here. Firstly, the essay sets out and examines different uses of the term ‘self ’ and ‘identity’ (alongside the related notion of ‘genidentity’). -
1 a REFUTATION of QUALIA-PHYSICALISM Michael
1 To appear in M. O’Rourke and C. Washington (eds.), Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry (MIT Press) A REFUTATION OF QUALIA-PHYSICALISM Michael McKinsey Wayne State University Recent defenders of reductive physicalism such as Brian Loar (1990, 1997) and John Perry (2001) have adopted an intriguing new strategy:i (1) accept as so much common sense (nearly) everything that property-dualists want to say about sensory qualia, including the central claims that sensory qualia determine ‘what it’s like’ to have a given sense experience, and that persons are directly aware of these qualia in the having of such experiences; (2) contend that while these common sense facts about qualia may show that our ways of thinking and speaking about qualia are conceptually different from our ways of thinking and speaking about physical properties of the brain, these facts do not show that sensory qualia themselves (as opposed to our ways of thinking and speaking about them) are distinct from physical properties of the brain; (3) use this contention to turn aside the few existing arguments against reductive physicalism by such property dualists as Kripke (1972), Nagel (1974), Jackson (1982), and Chalmers (1996); and finally (4) insist that sensory qualia are in fact just identical with physical properties of the brain, so that consequently, the facts about the sensory qualities of conscious experience are nothing over and above physical facts about the brain. I will call the view that incorporates this strategy ‘qualia-physicalism’, or ‘Q-physicalism’ for short. In this paper I will argue that Q-physicalism is false. -
Putnam's Argument That the Claim That We Are Brains-In-A-Vat Is Self
Richard McDonough / Putnam’s Argument… META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. X, NO. 1 / JUNE 2018: 149-159, ISSN 2067-3655, www.metajournal.org Putnam’s Argument that the Claim that We are Brains-in-a-vat is Self-Refuting Richard McDonough Arium Academy of Arts and Sciences, Singapore Abstract In Reason, Truth and History, Putnam provides an influential argument for the materialist view that the supposition that we are all “actually” brains in a vat [BIV’s] is “necessarily false”. Putnam admits that his argument, inspired by insights in Wittgenstein’s later views, is “unusual”, but he is certain that it is a correct. He argues that the claim that we are BIV’s is self-refuting because, if we actually are BIV’s, then we cannot refer to real physical things like vats. Although the present author agrees, fundamentally, with Heidegger’s view that we are essentially “in a world” (a real world, not a private “vat-world”), and, therefore, with Putnam’s conclusion that we cannot possibly be BIV’s, the paper argues that Putnam’s argument is fallacious. The proper conclusion to draw from Putnam’s argument is that asserting that one is a BIV is beyond the limits of a BIV’s (private) language. That is, Putnam only shows that if we actually are BIV’s, then we cannot think or assert either that we are or that we are not BIV’s. It does not show that we are not “actually” BIV’s. The cogency of this criticism is illustrated with a concrete “science-fiction” example. -
Front Matter
Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-41471-6 - Consciousness and the Self: New Essays Jeeloo Liu and John Perry Frontmatter More information CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry’s collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke, and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood, and the epistemic access to one’s own thoughts, desires, or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive sci- entists, and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self. jeeloo liu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (2006). john perry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (2001), Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (2002), and a number of other books. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org -
The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), Pp. 357-381
The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), pp. 357-381. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198207%2979%3A7%3C357%3ATIS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jphil.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 4 09:58:34 2007 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXIX, NO. 7, JULY 1982 THE INVERTED SPECTRUM* s best I can determine, the idea of spectrum inversion made its first appearance in the philosophical literature when A John Locke, in the Essay, entertained the possibility that "the same Object should flroduce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. -
The Transitivity of Material Constitution*
NOUSˆ 43:2 (2009) 363–377 The Transitivity of Material Constitution∗ ROBERT A. WILSON University of Alberta I. Introduction Material constitution and physical realization are both relations that have been used in articulating views in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For example, Lynne Baker1 has recently defended the idea that material con- stitution is a general relation that holds between statues and what they are made of, dollar bills and pieces of paper, and persons and bodies, contin- uing a longer tradition within metaphysics that takes constitution to be an important relation holding between pairs of things in the world.2 Appeal to physical realization, especially to multiple realization, has been central to the discussion of mental causation and non-reductive forms of materialism about the mind.3 Both constitution and realization are often contrasted with the relation of identity. Formally, identity is reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive. Con- stitution and realization, by contrast, are irreflexive and asymmetrical. But are constitution and realization transitive relations? In metaphysics, the view that material constitution is transitive is ubiq- uitous, an assumption expressed by both proponents and critics of con- stitution views.4 Likewise, it is typically assumed within the philosophy of mind that physical realization is a transitive relation. In both cases, this assumption of transitivity plays a role in discussion of the broader implica- tions of a metaphysics that invokes either relation. Here I provide reasons for questioning this assumption and the uses to which this appeal to tran- sitivity is put. As my title suggests, I shall focus on the case of material constitution, using a brief discussion of realization at the outset to motivate the discussion of the transitivity of material constitution at the core of the paper. -
The Moral Self Summer 2011
The Moral Self Summer 2011 Description This course will examine the nature of moral status. First, we will ask what it takes to have moral status. Do you have to be alive? Sentient? Autonomous? Second, we will ask whether groups can have moral status. For example, do nations, species, ecosystems, etc. have moral rights and/or duties? Third, we will ask whether parts of individuals can have moral status. For example, if a person has multiple personality disorder (or multiple personalities in a non-pathological sense), do their personalities have moral duties to each other? And do we have moral duties to our past or future selves more generally? Finally, we will ask when in life moral status begins and ends. Do we have moral duties to embryos and corpses? What about past and future generations? General Information • Time: M/W 6:00-9:00 • Place: TISC LC1 • Instructor: Jeff Sebo • Email: jeff[email protected] • Office: 285 Mercer, #902 • Office hours: by appointment • Course website: jeffsebo.net/teaching/ 1 Readings The required books for this course are: • David DeGrazia, Human Identity and Bioethics • Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons • John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality You can find the required books at Bluestockings (172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington) as well as online. All readings not from the required book will be posted on blackboard. Grading Your grades will be determined as follows: • Papers (70%): You can write either two 10-page papers (35% each) or one 20-page paper (70%) on the topic of your choice.