Intersecting Horizons

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-40
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
First Person ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Experiential State

How are we to imagine a situation in which I am simultaneously yet severally multiple subjects? Many contemporary writers on personal identity have said that one can imagine a scenario involving the fission of a person, a situation where as a result of division what was up to that moment a single person subsequently continues as two distinct people. One solution to the challenge of multiple embodiment is to defend the view that persons are individuals of a special sort, higher-order individuals somewhat akin to kinds. And yet the deeper issue is not metaphysical but phenomenological, and it isn’t a puzzle about the multiple embodiment of a single person but about a person’s simultaneous embrace of multiple first-person positions. Pessoa introduces the term ‘intersection’ as a philosophical term of art to denote the unified phenomenology of a doubled, interwoven experiential state. In one place he gives, as an example, the hypnagogic state. While the hypnagogic state occurs spontaneously, Pessoa claims that states of ‘intersecting sensation’ can also be brought about through the conscious exercise of guided attention. Yet Pessoa abandoned his experiments in intersectionist poetry, and his view seems to have undergone a shift. I wonder if he recognized that the force of the idea behind simultaneous subject plurality, that is, the experiential possibility to be in multiple subject positions simultaneously yet severally, is not fully realized in the concept of an emulsified experience.

A Fatal Error of Locke’s?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
John Locke ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Single Person

This chapter argues that the unqualified attribution of the radical theory to John Locke is mistaken if we are to take into account the fact that the theory allows for freaks like [Sₓ]. It first considers [I]-transfer without [P]-transfer—that is, [I]-transfer preserving personal identity—before discussing Locke's response to the idea that personal identity might survive [I]-transfer from an a priori point of view. It suggests that [I]-transfer is possible in such a way that the existence of a single Person [P₁] from t₁ to t₂ can successively (and non-overlappingly) involve the existence of two immaterial substances. It also explains how Locke's claim that [I]-transfer is possible opens up the possibility that it could go wrong, in such a way as to lead to injustice. Finally, it examines Locke's notion of “sensible creature,” which refers to a subject of experience who is a person.

Persons as Biological Processes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Sophie Meincke
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
Ontological Framework ◽  
Biological Nature

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides in the debate, to an ontology that gives priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process-ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

Seeming to Seem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
The Third Person

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

Two Sides of the Same Coin? Neutral Monism as an Attempt to Reconcile Subjectivity and Objectivity in Personal Identity

Metaphysica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Nils-Frederic Wagner ◽  
Iva Apostolova
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Neutral Monism ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Over Time

AbstractStandard views of personal identity over time often hover uneasily between the subjective, first-person dimension (e. g. psychological continuity), and the objective, third-person dimension (e. g. biological continuity) of a person’s life. Since both dimensions capture something integral to personal identity, we show that neither can successfully be discarded in favor of the other. The apparent need to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity, however, presents standard views with problems both in seeking an ontological footing of, as well as epistemic evidence for, personal identity. We contend that a fresh look at neutral monism offers a novel way to tackle these problems; counting on the most fundamental building blocks of reality to be ontologically neutral with regards to subjectivity and objectivity of personal identity. If the basic units of reality are, in fact, ontologically neutral – but can give rise to mental as well as physical events – these basic units of reality might account for both subjectivity and objectivity in personal identity. If this were true, it would turn out that subjectivity and objectivity are not conflictive dimensions of personal identity but rather two sides of the same coin.

Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Beaulieu
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
First Person ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Collective Voice ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Narrative Studies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Person Plural

AbstractThis article considers the “narrating-I” in African American fiction, reexamining its significance for narratological and sociopolitical theorizations of literature. First-person narratives can normally be understood as autodiegetic, in which the narrators present their experiences from their own perspectives at the expense of access to the viewpoints of other characters. However, African American narratives sometimes present their readers with first-person narrators who are seemingly more omniscient. Able to slip across the boundaries that demarcate their experience from that of others, these narrators can adopt the subject positions of other characters, shifting narrative focalization in ways that would normatively be impossible. Unlike “we” narratives that rely on the first-person plural to evoke collective storytelling, these works pluralize an otherwise singular narrator into a different sort of collective multiplicity. This paper argues that this plurality and multiplicity problematize the limitations of first-person narration, and in so doing resonate with issues surrounding the sociopolitical imagining of community. Through an investigation into the innovative narrative structures of John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday, this paper thus hopes to contribute to ongoing conversations in narrative studies by reassessing its standard narrative frameworks, as well as argue for the applicability of narratology to contemporary sociopolitical thought.

Consciousness and Synchronic Identity

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-530
Author(s):  
Carl Matheson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Branching Problem

The question “What makes a group of simultaneous experiences the experiences of a single person?” has been nearly ignored in the philosophical literature for the past few decades. The most common answer (e.g., Parfit 1984) to this much neglected question is “Two simultaneous experiences belong to a single person if there is a common consciousness or awareness of them.” However, consciousness and awareness are difficult concepts to analyze, so that little of substance has been said of the answer. Recently, Oaklander has argued that the awareness answer is deficient for a different reason, claiming that it fails because “it ultimately rests on an analysis of the unity of consciousness that is itself circular or otherwise inadequate” Oaklander 1987, p. 525). Oaklander's criticism is especially interesting because, according to it, the awareness account of synchronic personal identity falls prey to the main problem facing the memory (or psychological connectedness) account of diachronic identity, namely the problem of branching. In this paper, I shall argue that there is no important symmetry. Whatever its other flaws may be, the awareness account is immune to the branching problem; its immunity is due to formal differences between synchronic and diachronic identity.

Personal Identity, and its Morbid Modifications

1862 ◽  
Vol 8 (43) ◽  
pp. 385-395
Author(s):  
J. Crichton Browne
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
First Person ◽  
Mental Confusion ◽  
Vital Functions ◽  
Memory Experience ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Moment

The answer to Shakespeare's question, “What's in a name?” as conveyed in Juliet's subsequent remarks, is, at least in some points of view, unsatisfactory; for placing aside all regard to beauty or euphony of sound, there is yet much either of good or evil connected with every name that rises to our lips or is silently repeated in our minds. There is, to a sensitive being, a pleasure or a pain connected with it, in which memory, experience, and association have wrapped it round. True, the pleasure or the pain may be of infinite and almost imperceptible minuteness, but it is nevertheless an atom in our emotional existence, and is added to the sum of our mental experiences. This is the case with the words used to designate the objects which surround us, but is more obvious with those applied to places which we have visited or known, and to persons whom we have encountered, or with whom we have been familiar. But the importance and significance of a name are most clearly appreciated and understood, when viewed with reference to the articulate sound by which we ourselves are called by our fellow men. This we will find, upon reflection, to be a very important part of ourselves, to be intimately united to our “dear perfection,” and to adhere to us with wonderful tenacity, so that it is difficult to throw it aside. At the same time it is well known that a man may be legally stripped of his name, that on a sufficient payment, he may be permitted to denude himself of a beggarly appellation and to clothe himself in one of aristrocratic splendour. Yet even after this has been formally accomplished, the savour of his rags will still, we opine, hang about him. The memory of his discarded title will still, ever and anon, come back upon him like vestiges of a state of former existence, and will probably produce a mental confusion bordering upon double consciousness. Nor does it seem wonderful that a man's name should stick very closely to him and be difficult of divorce, when it is remembered how intimately it has been connected with all his conscious states from his very baptism, and how he has come to associate it almost indissolubly with the first person singular, the Ego, simple and concrete. Firmly grafted, as a man's name is upon his belief in his own personal identity, and being almost the sole expression of personal identity, as it certainly is, to many of the uneducated masses of mankind; it is not wonderful that it should be a permanent and persistent fact, difficult to be got rid of. For amongst the most fundamental principles of mind, is the conviction, out of which all names have arisen, that a man continues to be always himself; that he is at any given moment the same person that he was the moment before, and that he has always been, since he came into existence. This belief is, in fact, the very essence of mind, and arises necessarily out of the succession of momentary conscious states; just as corporeal identity springs out of a succession of material atoms endowed with certain vital functions.

scholarly journals A dynamic reframing of the social/personal identity dichotomy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Organizational Psychology ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Psychological Experience ◽  
Single Person ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Race And Culture

For decades, scholars in organizational and social psychology have distinguished between two types of identity: social and personal. To what extent, though, is this dichotomy useful for understanding identities and their dynamics, and might a different approach facilitate deeper insight? Such are the guiding questions of this article. I begin by reviewing framings of the social/personal identity dichotomy in organizational psychology, and tracing its origins and evolution in social psychology. I then evaluate the strengths and limitations of this dichotomy as a tool for understanding identities. In an attempt to retain the dichotomy’s strengths and overcome its limitations, I present a modified conceptualization of the social and personal dimensions of identity, one that defines these dimensions based on psychological experience (not identity content), and treats them as two independent continua (not two levels of a dichotomy, or opposing ends of a continuum) that any given identity varies along across contexts. Plain language summary A single person can identify with lots of different aspects of their life: their family, community, job, and hobbies, to name but a few. In the same way it helps to group different items in a shop into sections, it can be helpful to group the different identities available to people into categories. And for a long time, this is what researchers have done: calling certain identities “social identities” if based on things like race and culture, and “personal identities” if based on things like traits and habits. In this paper, I explain that for various reasons, this might not be the most accurate way of mapping identities. Instead of categorizing them based on where they come from, I suggest it’s more helpful to focus on how identities actually make people feel, and how these feelings change from one moment to the next. I also point out that many identities can make someone feel like a unique person and part of a broader group at the same time. For this reason, it’s best to think of the “social” and “personal” parts of an identity not as opposites—but simply different aspects of the same thing.

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