" Lewis (David) - Survival and Identity",.Wide: this adjective is applied because – it is held – mental continuity and connectedness can constitute personal identity even in the absence of its normal cause – such as the persistence of a particular human body or brain (which are the usual, but contingent) causes.Psychological Reductionism: claims of personal identity are solved by the holding of relations of psychological continuity 10, the ancestral of psychological connectedness 11.See " Parfit (Derek) - What We Believe Ourselves To Be", Section 78, pp. This is Parfit’s wide psychological reductionism, hereafter WPR.The dominant view is that we (people) are minds, maybe essentially embodied, but not dependent for our survival on any particular body or brain.The topic of Personal Identity will address a dry generalisation, as against any of the interesting specific alternative views of what a person might be that have guided practical life. But, empirically, there is no universally-accepted concept of what people are so, the concept is unspecific and will give the “method of cases” problems.No Overgeneralisation Requirement : responses to the puzzle cases are to be based on the above, not on overgeneralisations 8 from normal cases or from religious (or secular) preconceptions.Reductionist Requirement 7: our concept of “same person 8” must be capable of being grasped in non-circular terms of necessary and sufficient conditions based on continuity and dependence relations.Reliance on intuitive reactions to puzzle cases would be justified as an approach to personal identity only if two conditions are satisfied:.We’re not just dealing with relations between concepts. Mental or physical continuity might be evidence for personal survival, but is not part of its meaning. But the situation isn’t as clear-cut when we come to people.The paradigm is somewhat dry, but works well because we’re analysing the relations between concepts – and concepts that are agreed upon. Compare Gettier cases in Epistemology.Avoid the analytic paradigm of death by thought experiment, with competing accounts of the necessary and sufficient conditions for Personal Identity evaluated by how well they compare with intuitions derived from the TEs 6.
Philosophy needs to be precise without being desiccating.
PARFIT WE ARE NOT HUMAN BEINGS PDF
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File 3.