Staying alive : personal identity, practical concerns, and the unity of a life / Marya Schechtman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schechtman, Marya, 1960- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Identity (Philosophical concept).

Identity (Psychology).

Physical Description:

x, 214 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Locke and the Psychological Continuity Theorists 10

1.1 Locke on Identity and the Practical 11

1.2 Neo-Lockean Psydiological Continuity Theorists 20

1.2.1 Early Development 22

1.2.2 Reductionism and What Matters 30

1.2.3 The Extreme Claim 34

1.3 Summing Up 41

2 Division of Labor 43

2.1 Korsgaard: Autonomy and a Response to Parfit 44

2.2 Olsons Animalism 49

2.3 The Strong Independence Model and the Forensic Unit 56

2.3.1 Korsgaard 57

2.3.2 Olson 61

2.4 Summing Up 65

3 The Expanded Practical and the Problem of Multiplicity 68

3.1 Lindemann and the Range of the Practical 69

3.1.1 Lindemann on the Identity of the Moral Self 69

3.1.2 The Expanded Practical 71

3.2 What Kind of Practical Unit? 75

3.3 The Problem of Multiplicity 80

4 Complexity and Individual Unity 89

4.1 McMahan's Embodied Mind Account 89

4.1.1 An Overview 90

4.1.2 The Theory of Time-Relative Interests 93

4.2 The Narrative Self Constitution View 99

4.2.1 An Overview 99

4.2.2 Expanding the Narrative Self-Constitution View-Narratives and Lives 103

5 The Person Life View 110

5.1 Characteristic Person Lives: an Overview 111

5.2 Atypical Developmental Trajectory 119

5.3 Anomalous Social Position 125

5.4 Nonbuman Persons 131

5.5 Summing Up 137

6 Personal Identity 139

6.1 Biological Life and the Continuation of an Organism 140

6.2 Person Lives: a Cluster Model 347

6.3 Puzzle Cases 151

6.3.1 The Simple Transfer Case 151

6.3.2 The Surviving Animal Transfer Case 154

6.3.3 Fission 159

6.4 Summing Up 166

7 Ontology 169

7.1 Animalist Objections 169

7.2 Responses to the Animalist Objections 171

7.2.1 Constitution 171

7.2.2 Literal Questions without Substances 178

7.2.3 The Priority of Persons in Everyday Life 183

7.2.4 What about Oysters? 187

7.3 What was the Question? 195

7.4 Summing Up 197.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-207) and index.

Other Format:

Also available online: Schechtman, Marya. Staying alive.

ISBN:

9780199684878

0199684871

OCLC:

859580955