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Personal Identity and the Self

Expected online publication date:  12 August 2024

Rory Madden
Affiliation:
University College London

Summary

What are we? What owns our thoughts and experiences? Are we anything at all? After an introduction, Section 2 assesses a 'no-bearer' theory of experience, and the 'no-self' contention that our self-representations are about no real entity, before introducing a positive hypothesis about the objects of our self-representations: the 'animalist' claim that we are biological organisms. Section 3 discusses the classic challenge to animalism that brain transplantation is a situation which we could survive but no animal could survive. The challenge serves to introduce some positive alternatives to animalism, as well as animalist responses, including a response which questions the assumption that psychology is irrelevant to organism persistence. Section 4 surveys a 'thinking parts' problem and cases of conjoined twinning and commisurotomy, also considered problematic for animalism. The interpretation of these cases revisits questions about bearers of experience, objects of self-representation, and the relation of biology and psychology.
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Online ISBN: 9781009570497
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

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Personal Identity and the Self
  • Rory Madden, University College London
  • Online ISBN: 9781009570497
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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Personal Identity and the Self
  • Rory Madden, University College London
  • Online ISBN: 9781009570497
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Personal Identity and the Self
  • Rory Madden, University College London
  • Online ISBN: 9781009570497
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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