Dear All, Next Tuesday (12th), Lynne Rudder Baker, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will give a talk entitled 'The Primitive Persistence of Persons over Time'. An abstract is attached below.
The meeting will start at 5.15pm and will be held in the Fisher Building of St. John's College in either the Boys Smith Room, the Dirac Room, or the Castlereagh Room. As usual, the speaker will present for no longer than 45 minutes, followed by a discussion until 7.00pm. If you would like to join Lynne for dinner after the talk, then please let me know by noon on the day of the talk. The termcard is available online: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/moral_sci.html Regards, Daniel Brigham Secretary of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge *** The issue of personal identity is a metaphysical one that concerns persistence conditions; it is not an issue just about our concepts or conventions. On my view, once we understand what a person is—a being with a first-person perspective essentially—we have the account of personal identity over time: A person exists at time t and time t’ if and only if her first-person perspective is exemplified at t and t’. But since the ‘her’ in ‘her first-person perspective’ requires reference to the person, the condition is not informative. Nevertheless, the view is not thereby deprived of interest. I have a good deal to say about the first-person perspective (both rudimentary and robust stages) and about the conditions under which a human person comes into existence (gradually. If I’m right, the absence of informative sufficient conditions for identity over time lies in the nature of the case: Persons are essentially persons. Their transtemporal identity does not consist in relations among subpersonal or nonpersonal entities (like mental or physical states), and hence the conditions for personal identity over time cannot be informative. Call the view that there are no informative sufficient conditions for personal identity ‘primitive persistence’. My view, (FPP), is one of primitive persistence. (FPP) If x and y are persons who exist at t1 and t2, respectively, then x = y if and only if x’s exemplification of a first-person perspective at t1 is the same state of affairs as y’s exemplification of a first-person perspective at t2. Now turn to Michael Della Rocca’s endorsement of what he calls ‘Parfit’s Plausible Principle’: (PPP) If there are objects, A, B, and C, and B C, B and C are equally and significantly causally and qualitatively continuous with A, and there is no other object besides A which exists at the same time as A and which is such that B and C are as causally and qualitatively continuous with it as they are with A, then it cannot be the case that A = B and A C and it cannot be the case that A B and A = C. (Della Rocca, Journal of Philosophy 2012: 599) After pointing to the conflict between my nonreductionist view and Parfit’s reductionist view, I argue that we have no reason to accept (PPP) over (FPP) and primitive persistence. One advantage of primitive persistence over (PPP) is that primitive persistence offers a hedge against Parfit’s argument that detaches survival from identity. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
