Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity

Fülszöveg

This monograph concerns the claims of spatio-temporal continuity to provide a criterion of identity for material objects, human beings, and other animals or organisms.
The notion of spatio-temporal continuity has figured frequently both in philosophical discussion of material objects, for which it is usually taken to give an unproblematic identity-criterion and in argument about the nature of persons. For these, a bodily criterion is often attacked or defended either as a contentious competitor or as an uneasy companion of character or memory-claim criteria of identity. Until recently the notion of spatio-temporal continuity was less often discussed for its own sake - a state of affairs the first impression of this 1967 study may have done something to remedy.
The author makes his approach to the more familiar questions of personal identity through a number of concrete and particular problems about the identity of ordinary material objects. These he has tackled through a formal... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This monograph concerns the claims of spatio-temporal continuity to provide a criterion of identity for material objects, human beings, and other animals or organisms.
The notion of spatio-temporal continuity has figured frequently both in philosophical discussion of material objects, for which it is usually taken to give an unproblematic identity-criterion and in argument about the nature of persons. For these, a bodily criterion is often attacked or defended either as a contentious competitor or as an uneasy companion of character or memory-claim criteria of identity. Until recently the notion of spatio-temporal continuity was less often discussed for its own sake - a state of affairs the first impression of this 1967 study may have done something to remedy.
The author makes his approach to the more familiar questions of personal identity through a number of concrete and particular problems about the identity of ordinary material objects. These he has tackled through a formal inquiry into the requirements of any identity-criterion whatever and the effective satisfaction of these requirements by our present conception of a persisting material body of any given sort.
The author's determination to found this subject in the philosophy of logic has made possible a concise discussion of a wide variety of related topics, including relative identity (which forms the starting point of the work), things and their matter, essentialism, classification and cross-classification, sortal concepts, the self-body relationship, physicalism, personal memory, and the supposed possibility of clash between psychological and material criteria of personal identity. In the last section a new criterion for personal identity is advocated which modifies and supersedes the criterion of straightforward bodily continuity. The impossibility is demonstrated of conflict between an acceptable spatio-temporal ! and an acceptable psychological criterion of personal identity. A unified and essentially Aristotelian conception of person is defended. Vissza