Surviving matters : pluralism and the self
type: CreativeWork
description: The concept of personal identity or survival is intimately entwined with a whole host of our self- and other- directed beliefs, concerns, and practices. We naturally and habitually believe and judge certain people to be the same persons over time; identify and reidentify them; trust them; love them; punish them; are angry with them; care about them; attribute them certain ongoing rights and obligations; ascribe to ourselves and others actions, beliefs, intentions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions and physical traits; expect to remember directly our own experiences; have a special and intense interest in what befalls ourselves; feel remorse, embarrassment, guilt, regret, pride, shame; and so on almost ad infinitum. Call all these many self- and other-directed beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices, our person-directed practices. For persons, and their continuing existence over time, are the object of all these beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices. So all these many person-directed practices are organized around our concept of personal identity. And it is this special and distinctive role which the concept of personal identity plays in our social network and in our own concerns that would seem to mark it off from concepts like squareness, for example, which do not play this special kind of role in subjects' practices and concerns. As J.M. Shorter, for example, writes, Why is it important to determine the identity of a given person correctly? From this point of view the importance of the concept is obviously immense. Our views about how we ought (morally speaking and otherwise) to behave towards other people depend very largely upon who we think those people are. How I think it proper to treat the person before me depends upon whether that person is (the same person as) my old friend, my employer, my wife, the homicidal maniac who escaped from detention last week, my father, my mother, my son, the man who did m…
abstract: The concept of personal identity or survival is intimately entwined with a whole host of our self- and other- directed beliefs, concerns, and practices. We naturally and habitually believe and judge certain people to be the same persons over time; identify and reidentify them; trust them; love them; punish them; are angry with them; care about them; attribute them certain ongoing rights and obligations; ascribe to ourselves and others actions, beliefs, intentions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions and physical traits; expect to remember directly our own experiences; have a special and intense interest in what befalls ourselves; feel remorse, embarrassment, guilt, regret, pride, shame; and so on almost ad infinitum. Call all these many self- and other-directed beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices, our person-directed practices. For persons, and their continuing existence over time, are the object of all these beliefs, concerns, attitudes, expectations and practices. So all these many person-directed practices are organized around our concept of personal identity. And it is this special and distinctive role which the concept of personal identity plays in our social network and in our own concerns that would seem to mark it off from concepts like squareness, for example, which do not play this special kind of role in subjects' practices and concerns. As J.M. Shorter, for example, writes, Why is it important to determine the identity of a given person correctly? From this point of view the importance of the concept is obviously immense. Our views about how we ought (morally speaking and otherwise) to behave towards other people depend very largely upon who we think those people are. How I think it proper to treat the person before me depends upon whether that person is (the same person as) my old friend, my employer, my wife, the homicidal maniac who escaped from detention last week, my father, my mother, my son, the man who did m…
author: West, Caroline Jane
language: en_AU
date published: 1995
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:54:44Z
provider: Australian National University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian National University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/9918