Abstract
I hope in this paper to establish that, in an important sense of ‘empirical’, the concept of personal identity is not wholly an empirical concept. It cannot therefore be equated, as some philosophers have maintained, with the concept of some relation or set of relations whose existence could only be discovered empirically. I also hold that the concept of identity is not the concept of a relation at all. If, therefore, it is implicit in thoughts that we have of ourselves as remembering, intending, fearing, etc., which are crucial to our thought of ourselves as persons, it is difficult to see how it could be replaced, as has also been envisaged, by some relational concept or concepts. I do not believe that the concept of personal identity can either be reduced to some other concept, or allowed to fall into disuse as a relic of outworn, metaphysical beliefs no longer important to us.
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Notes
Philosophical Review 80, 1971, 3-27 (reprinted in J. Glover (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, pp. 142-162). The remarks quoted are on p. 147 of the reprint, to which page references given below also refer.
On p. 152 of his essay ‘Names and Identity’ (in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 139-158) Geach remarks: ‘I have heard there are those who would regard the identity expressed by personal proper names as being conceivably non-transitive’. It is important to note that this is not Parfit’s view: the necessary transitivity of identity is one of his reasons for dispensing with it as ‘what matters in survival’.
R. M. White, ‘Wittgenstein on Identity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 78, 1977, 157–174. In ‘Is Identity a Relation?’, ibid. 80, 1979, 81-100, I have argued that Wittgenstein’s view that identity is not a relation is correct, but not his belief that we need no sign for identity. I have developed these themes more extensively in What Is Identity?, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989.
Op, cit., p. 168.
Cf. McTaggart’s article s. v. ‘Personality’ in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1915. (It was, of course, Peter Geach who drew my attention to this.) My ideas in this and the following section owe much to two papers by Richard Swinburne: ‘Personal Identity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74, 1973, 231-248, and ‘Persons and Personal Identity’, in H.D. Lewis (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy (Fourth Series), George Allen and Unwin, London, 1976, pp. 221-238.
See P.T. Geach, Reference and Generality, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1962, § 31.
This was argued convincingly by Sidney Shoemaker in Chapter IV of Self-knowledge and Self-Identity, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1963.
Cf. G.E.M. Anscombe ‘The First Person’, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 45–65.
John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. xxvii, § 11.
God and the Soul, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, p. 11.
De Anima III 428b 2-4.
That he does in fact so overstep the mark is clear from the following passage, inter alia: ‘Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person’ (ibid. § 26, my italics).
5.532. The Pears-McGuinness translation has ‘(∃x. y)’ instead of ‘(∃x, y)’ at its third occurrence in the English version of this proposition.
Cf. A. G. N. Flew, ’selves’, Mind 58, 1949, 355–358.
Op. cit., p. 152.
Cf. S. Shoemaker, ‘Persons and Their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7, 1970, 269–285.
Ibid., nn. 22, 25, 21.
D. Wiggins, ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’, in Amelie Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1976, pp. 139–173; see p. 142. (This appeared in Philosophy 51, 1976, 131-158. It is referred to as unpublished in a footnote to Parfit’s 1971 Philosophical Review article; though this footnote is amended in the reprint in Glover’s collection. For references, see note 1 above.)
Who should not be thought to include Reid, whom Parfit in the same note quotes disapprovingly as saying ‘My memory testifies not only that this was done, but that it was done by me who now remember it’. Reid’s phrase ‘who now remember it’ suffers from the same scope-ambiguity as Parfit’s phrase ‘the person who now seems to remember it’. Palma’s article ‘Memory and Personal Identity’ is in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 42, 1964, 53-68.
Antony Flew, ‘Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity’, Philosophy 26, 1951, p. 55.
‘“He” The Logic of Self-Consciousness’, Ratio 8, 1966,130-168; (cf. also Castaneda’s ‘On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I’ in Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy Volume III, Herder, Vienna, 1969, pp. 260-266, with the bibliography appended). Miss Anscombe has pointed out (op. cit., p. 46) that this use of ‘he’, etc., which Castaneda distinguishes by placing an asterisk after the pronoun, corresponds to the Greek word ‘∈, oύ, oί’.
II Kings (= II Samuel), ch. 12.
I have argued this point at greater length in ‘Is Identity a Relation?’ (see note 3 above). I call there for a restricted interpretation of ‘existential generalization’ which makes the suggested rule of inference acceptable. See also What Is Identity?, Chapters 3 and 4.
Cf. ‘On the Logic of the Attribution of Self-Knowledge to Others’, Journal of Philosophy 65, 1968, p. 442.
I am grateful to those who took part in a class I gave in the University of Notre Dame and to those who commented on a paper I read in the University of Bristol—both in 1978—for assisting me to develop my thoughts on this subject.
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Williams, C.J.F. (1991). On Sameness and Selfhood. In: Lewis, H.A. (eds) Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Synthese Library, vol 213. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_15
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