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Real people : personal identity without thought experiments / Kathleen V. Wilkes.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Wilkes, Kathleen V., author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Identity (Psychology).
- Consciousness.
- Psychology, Pathological.
- Psychology--Methodology.
- Psychology.
- Identification (Psychology).
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (x, 249 pages) : illustrations
- Other Title:
- Personal identity without thought experiments
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford : Clarendon, 1993.
- Summary:
- This treatise explores the scope and limits of the concept of personal identity in contemporary philosophy. The author begins by questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation arguing that it engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results and that truth is stranger than fiction.
- Contents:
- 1. Thought experiments. What thought experiments are
- First difficulty: the background
- Parenthesis: relevance and natural kinds
- Second difficulty: imagination and "possibility"
- Conditions of personhood
- The identification issue: laws and theoretical impossibilities
- The reindentification issue: more science fantasies
- Losing touch with reality
- A promissory note. 2. Infants and foetuses. Potentialities and interests
- Infants as fuzzy persons
- Failed potentials: the "Aristotelian principle"
- IVF embryos.
- 3. Mental deficiency, breakdown, and insanity. The sanity of irrationality
- What is mental illness?
- Contrasts with the psychopath
- The subnormal and the senile
- Speciesism. 4. Fugues, hypnosis, and multiple personality. The unity and continuity of consciousness
- Fugues and epileptic automatism
- Hypnosis
- Multiple personality: Christine Beauchamp
- How many Miss Beauchamps?
- Unity; and the Greeks. 5. Being in two minds. The problem introduced
- Our two brains
- Commissurotomy
- Philosophical perplexities
- The language of brains
- Some semi-parallels
- P.S.: an apparent exception
- Confabulation and the drive to minimize disunity
- How should we explain conflicts?
- Counting minds
- A final word on the brain.
- 6. The coherence of consciousness. Consciousness head-on
- Other times, other places
- The heterogeneity of consciousness
- Parenthesis: two paths to avoid
- Consciousness and the sciences
- 'Consciousness' in the vernacular
- Self-consciousness. 7. Models of mind. 'Models'
- Man in the Iliad
- Aristotle's man
- From 'psuche' to mind
- The domination of the mind
- The person as a computer.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- Other Format:
- Print version
- ISBN:
- 0-19-168028-1
- 0-19-824080-5
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