Personal Identity

by Sydney Shoemaker, Richard Swinburne

Opposing perspectives offer deep insight into identity Personal Identity explores the idea of identity by way of a debate between prominent philosophers with competing points of view. Richard Swinburne presents personal identity in the context of dualism, while Sydney Shoemaker argues a materialist's perspective in contrast. With each theory presented individually with illustrations and clear explanations, the second part of the book is devoted to each author's reply and rebuttal to his opponent's ideas. Whether exploring personal identity for the first time or delving deeper into an established philosophical niche, this book offers a lively discussion with much insight and room for analysis.

Genres: Philosophy, Metaphysics

167 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Sydney Shoemaker is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. He has worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and has many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), he argues that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argues that the phenomenon of absolute 'Immunity to Error Through Misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds"). In metaphysics, he has defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional causal powers. He has also applied his view of properties to the problem of mental causation. He also has distinguished contributions to the literature on self-knowledge and personal identity, where he defended a Lockean psychological continuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts". In his recent work on the content of perception, he has argued for a distinctive version of internalist representationalism.

Reviews

[Cassidy Brinn]

The title should be: What is personal identity in a world of brain transplants? How about in a world of brain-state transfers? Is this the most crucial question? How about EXAMPLES instead of thought experiments?

Swinburne's reply is directed against functionalism in general, rather than Shoemaker's essay, and therefore attacks problems with functionalism (not all causal experience is public) that Shoemaker has already addressed. On the other hand, Shoemaker's reply goes step by step through Swinburne's logical fallacies. If there's a winner here, it's Shoemaker. But the victory can't be chalked up to materialism -- as Shoemaker says, his account is entirely compatible with dualism.

He does claim to have argued in section 8, The Unity of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, that "facts about the nature of our self-knowledge provide no sound basis for a dualist (anti-materialist) view of mind and personal identity." Did he? No. He claims that self-knowledge is "radically different from perceptual knowledge," explains why (immediacy) and ends by declaring that, "recognition of these facts should help to dispel the notion that the nature of self-knowledge supports the Cartesian view that the self is a peculiar sort of object, or the Humean view that it is no sort of object at all." (105) It's the same move he did in Self-reference and Self-awareness 16 years earlier: The self is not known through perception, ergo Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein were wrong.

He needs a lot more to dispel those notions - such as a coherent explanation of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge does not identify, but does it refer? Does it play an objective role in a functionalist system? Swinburne did get it right, when he argued that Shoemaker must clarify the character of mental states, before he can go on to use the concept of a mental state in his overall picture of personal identity.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and informative discussion on a rather narrow set of topics within metaphysics/ontology/philosophy of mind. Shoemaker is a functionalist materialist and Swinburne is a dualist. Both believe that psychological continuity are key to persistence of identity through time, but disagree on a whole host of other positions related to this one--most notably on what persistence is realized in (material or immaterial substance).

I enjoyed the back and forth format of the book, although the majority of the book is divided into two section in which each author sort of does his own thing.