I had suggested we’d be discussing The Prestige next week, but after shifting some topics around on the Calendar, it looks to me now that we’ll be discussing it shortly after Fall Break (which is Fri Oct 17). So you have a bit longer window to arrange a time to watch this. Do be ready to discuss it when we come back from Fall Break though.
As announced earlier, on Wednesday we’ll have a quiz where you summarize what the philosophical arguments are in a passage taken from our readings. For Friday, I want you to read Chapter 2 of the Perry collection. (Note this is different than the Perry dialogue, which is what we were reading before. Chapter 2 of the Perry collection is a text titled “Of Identity and Diversity” authored by John Locke.) This was first published about 330 years ago. I expect that you’ll find this text very challenging to read. Try to get through the whole thing for Friday; I’ll be explaining parts of it and you’ll have to reread it, or parts of it, several times for later meetings.
Some assistance with this text:
- When Locke says “identity and diversity,” he means what we’re calling “being numerically identical” and “being numerically different (non-identical).”
- When Locke talks about a “thinking substance,” he thinks this is either a immaterial soul or something like a material body or brain (he’s not sure which).
- When Locke talks about a “man” (better would be for him to say “human”), he will argue this is something like a living human body, which is different from what he thinks persons are. He thinks persons could move from one living body to another.
- When Locke talks about “consciousness of your past self,” he probably means memory.
- On your first reads of this text, you might skim or focus less on sections 1–3, and 7, and 11–13, and 20–22, and everything after 23.
Despite this text being more challenging to read, it will reward our study. The view Locke is working towards will be similar to the Proposal #5 that we discussed in class today.
I said I’d post lecture notes on the material we’ve discussed the past few classes (Friday’s zoom meeting and today). Some of these notes will be posted later this week; other notes are ready now:
For Monday, continue reading in Perry’s Second Night. In my print copy, you should read to
the top of p. 27. Stop where Sam Miller says Well, what’s the problem now?
(As before, you’re welcome to continue reading, as we’ll be discussing the rest of the Second Night over the coming classes. But I’m just asking you to focus on these initial pages for Monday.)
Sometime over the next week or so few weeks, you should watch the film The Prestige. Even if you’ve seen it before, I recommend watching it again, so that it’s fresh in your mind. (I will be asking you to discuss and write about the plot.) My casual research suggests that the movie is currently available for rent on YouTube Movies, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Xfinity, and DIRECTV. If you have difficulty obtaining the movie from any of these services, perhaps you can join up with someone else in the class who can access them. Another option is that I have a physical DVD of the movie, which you could borrow and watch on a DVD player. (But then you’d need access to one of those, which is becoming rarer these days. Perhaps the library has some?)
We will have a quiz this coming Wednesday. As I said in class earlier, this next quiz will ask you to summarize a passage of philosophical discussion of personal identity (one you’ve seen before) in your own words. The passage will be provided; you won’t need to have physical copies of the texts we’ve read to take the quiz.
I will post notes summarizing today’s Zoom meeting, but not until later next week. In the meantime, if you missed today’s session but want to watch a recording of it, email me for a link.
Reminder on Friday our class will be by Zoom rather than in person. Be sure to use the first Zoom link on that page, not the one for office hours.
For Friday, read the first few pages of the Second Night of the Perry dialogue. In my print copy, this goes to the top of p. 22. Stop where Gretchen says Well suppose — and I emphasize suppose — I grant you all of this. Where does it leave you?
(You’re welcome to continue reading, as we’ll be discussing the rest of the Second Night over the coming classes. But I’m just asking you to focus on these initial pages for Friday.)
Here are my lecture notes on Perry’s First Night. I’ll make some of the text display in purple. Those will be the parts where I’m summarizing Gretchen Weirob’s criticisms of Sam Miller’s three strategies. In other words, my attempts to summarize the parts you were summarizing in class today. As I said, I think you all did good jobs of identifying where in the text the action was happening, and what the core idea of each of Gretchen’s criticisms was.
As I said in class, on this Friday we’ll meet by Zoom rather than in person. Be sure to use the first Zoom link on that page, not the one for office hours.
For Wednesday’s class, reread the First Night of the Perry Dialogue, noting down when Gretchen makes her challenge to Sam’s proposal, and where he articulates each of his three strategies for responding to that challenge. These are the three moves we talked about at the end of today’s class, at the end of the handout. In Wenesday’s class, we’re going to do a group exercise, where each group tries to identify in the text where Gretchen criticizes each of those moves, and summarize for the class what her criticisms were.
Please try to bring a physical copy of the First Night to our class meeting. If you didn’t buy a physical copy of the book, try to bring a printout of at least the First Night.
For those of you who missed today’s class, Sam’s theory is that A and B are numerically the same person if and only if (“iff”) they have numerically the same soul.
Gretchen’s challenge to this view is: If Sam’s theory is right, how can we know / acquire good reason to believe that A and B are the same person, in the way that ordinary people often seem to do?
Neither Gretchen nor Sam wants to give up on ordinary people being able to know / acquire good reason to believe such things. Sam wants to try to explain how his theory could make sense of them doing that.
Sam’s first proposal is: our judgments of personal identity (that A and B are numerically the same person) are based on the hypothesis that if A and B have the same body, then they probably have the same soul.
Sam’s second proposal is: First, we observe whether A’s body and B’s body display the same psychological characteristics; second, we reason that if the psychological characteristics are (qualitatively) the same (and the body is numerically the same), then the body is probably inhabited by numerically the same soul.
Sam’s third proposal is: He can establish a correlation between (numerically) the same body and (numerically) the same soul in his own case. This gives him some reason to think that in other people’s cases, too, sameness of body goes along with sameness of soul.
Gretchen criticizes each of these proposals. So she thinks Sam’s theory can’t explain how ordinary people acquire knowledge / good reasons to reindentify people in the way we think they often can.
Today we talked more about Leibniz’s Law. We’ll start discussing the First Night of Perry’s dialogue on Monday.
Here is the timeline of different philosophers and families of views about personal identity that I passed out as a handout on Wednesday.
Because of the timing of when we’ll be discussing which topics, I’m canceling the quiz we were going to have next Wed (Oct 1). The questions that would have been on it won’t be ones we’re yet ready for on that date. Instead I’ll move them to the next quiz, on Wed Oct 8.
Here are answers and comments on the exam.
Here is the review sheet updated for Wednesday’s quiz. ( As I said in class, I added some entries to the review sheet to emphasize some additional issues we discussed today. They’re not on the printed version handed out in class.)
(Optional) If you want to read some more arguments for dualism, there are two pages of notes from another course. Also relevant are pp. 262–65 in the van Inwagen reading (parts I didn’t assign for this course).
(Optional) If you want to read about arguments against dualism, there are some notes from another course. They correspond roughly to middle p. 226 – middle p. 229 and p. 260 – top p. 262 in the van Inwagen reading (parts I didn’t assign for this course).
For Friday, please read “The First Night” of the Dialogue and Personal Identity and Immortality by John Perry that I asked you to buy for the course. In coming weeks, we’re going to spend a lot of time with this text. I’ll refer to it as “the Perry dialogue.” (The other textbook for this course is a collection of papers, edited by the same philosopher John Perry. I’ll refer to that as “the Perry collection.”)
You should expect to be reading each Night in the Perry dialogue several times, aiming for a closer and more careful understanding of the arguments each time. But for Friday, it’s enough for you just to have read it the first time.
Read for Monday:
van Inwagen, from p. 223 – top p. 233
Note that I’m only assigning part of that PDF to read, but you are welcome to read more of it if you want to see other arguments for (and some arguments against) dualism. The linked reading is the “clean copy” of that selection. Here is an alternate “annotated” copy of the selection, where I mark in pencil the topics of various paragraphs, underline important claims, and say where the discussion of some topics begins and ends (sometimes these extend over several pages). As I say in the Guidelines on Reading Philosophy, marking up readings in this way is an extremely useful tool to help you understand and think about the readings better. I like to do it in pencil on hard copies, but you can also mark up documents in many PDF readers, or you can take notes for yourself in a separate notebook or file, sketching a brief outline of what you’ve read. (And maybe some reactions or questions that occur to you while you’re reading.) You won’t do this for everything you read, but it is a great habit to develop as your default approach to texts that will be important to what you’re studying or thinking about.
Read for Friday:
I’ve graded the quizzes and will post to Canvas. Most everybody got a little bit wrong but not too much. I often gave partial credit if you gave answers that said some of what was important but not all of it, or if you also said some things that were incorrect. 10 of you (almost half) got As, 8 got A-s, 4 got B+s.
We went over answers at the end of class, but I’ll repeat some points. Being a dualist in the sense of holding thesis D gives one lots of latitude about what else they say. Even if you agree with them about D, you may disagree with their other views. They don’t have to think that people are identical to their souls (they might be identical to a combination of a living body and a soul); they don’t have to think people can exist after the body dies (for example, if people are such combinations, there is no combination anymore when there’s no living body). They may have different views than you do about what AIs or animals are capable of, and whether they have souls.
Another point worth mentioning is the meaning of “essence.” When you’re talking about a particular object, its essence is the properties it’s impossible for it to exist without. Or in other words, the properties it has to have, in order to exist. Some of you said instead, the properties it has to have, in order to be that thing. This is a slightly different idea. Some philosophers use “essence” to express the second notion rather than the first, so I didn’t penalize anyone for it. But with the vocabulary I was teaching you, I’d call that second notion your “identity conditions,” not your “essence.” What is the difference between the first notion of essence (the properties you have to have, in order to exist) and this second notion, that I’m calling your identity conditions? Well, with the first notion, it might be for example, that what I need to exist is to have a living human body, and that’s also what you need to exist. So you and I could have the same essence. But with the second notion, if I am a different person than you, what I need in order to be me would presumably be different from what you need in order to be you.
Whichever way you understand “essence,” saying you are essentially alive would still be compatible with your dying. It would just be that after dying, you would no longer exist (as yourself, and presumably you wouldn’t exist as something else, either). By contrast, saying you are immortal would be incompatible with your dying.
A third way some of you interpreted “essence” was as being any property you had (perhsps something in your history, or part of your social identity) that played an important role (perhaps even a necessary role) in making you the way you are now. That is, as having some of the properties that you now happened to have, such as personality traits. It’s important that you recognize this is not the way philosophers use the notion of “essence.” The kinds of properties you’re referring to may be important to your life history, and could in some ways be more important to you than the ones philosophers call “essential” to you. But when philosophers talk about “essences” and “essential properties,” those are not the properties they mean. (See the page on Identities and Essences for more.)
I’ve updated the review sheet for next Wednesday’s quiz.
I’ve also posted notes summarizing our discussion a few classes back about Personhood.
Some followups about arguments that got raised in today’s debate game.
As we said in class, being a dualist doesn’t commit you to any particular view about which creatures do and don’t have souls.
At one point the Dualist team connected the notion of a soul to the notion of consciousness, which they said came in degrees. It would have been natural to ask whether having souls also came in degrees? How would that work? (A different view might say that all creatures have souls, just some have more complex souls.)
At one point, the Materialist team linked the Materialist picture of what minds are like to the claim that everything we do is predetermined and unfree. This is an interesting connection, and may be part of what motivates some people to accept (or to reject) Materialism. But as a matter of fact, many philosophers count themselves as Materialists and deny that everything we do is predetermined. (Many philosophers also reject the equation between predetermined and unfree; but we don’t need to pursue that right now.) There have even been some philosophers who are Dualists and yet also think that everything we do is predetermined. Only a few examples of that combination, but it is a coherent option. So the step from claims about the Dualism/Materialism debate (also known as “the metaphysics of mind” or “the mind/body problem”) to claims about things being predetermined or not, or the reverse, isn’t an automatic straightforward one.
Read for Friday: Dualism and Materialism
There’s no class this coming Monday. Next Wednesday we’ll have a quiz. I’ll update the review sheet before we meet on Friday.
I re-ordered the web pages I posted on Friday, and inserted an additional page. I asked you to read the Messiness and Ontology notes from that list for today; please read the remaining three for Wednesday.
I want to summarize (and to some extent expand on) what we said about persons last Friday. Also some observations about different kinds of questions we ask, and different ways of answering them, have come up in different ways over the past weeks, that’d be helpful for me to summarize. So I will make two webnotes on those:
- Questions, Answers, Knowledge
- Personhood
I don’t have those webpages written up and ready to go yet, so I’ll have to post them later. But take this as a notice that tney’ll be forthcoming.
For Monday and continuing into next week, there is no primary text to read yet. But the first of the following webnote pages summarizes (and expands on) what I was saying at the end of class today, and the other pages summarize material that we’ll be working through next week. Please read at least the first and second page for Monday, and read the other two pages for later in the week. It’s fine if you want to read ahead. Normally I won’t post webnotes until after we’ve introduced ideas in class, but in this case, because the ideas are so abstract, it will be especially useful for you to have lots of time to digest and think about them (and ideally to come to class ready to ask questions).
Here are answers and comments on the exam. I’ll post grades now in Canvas.
There won’t be any primary texts to read for a few classes. I’ll post some more web notes here to read, by Friday if you can else by Monday.
I wasn’t able to post the new web notes yet, so look for them over the weekend.
Here are notes summarizing materials discussed in the past few classes:
The last page summarizes and expands on material that we won’t get to until today’s class.
Here is a review sheet of material that’s candidates for being on our quiz next Wednesday. As we’ve discussed in class, you’ll be allowed to consult any printed or written notes during the quiz, but not use laptops, tablets, or phones. However, the time to complete the quiz will be limited.
In class today, we discussed one kind of question What makes something be a church? What does it take?
, and a different kind of question What makes something stay the same church, rather than becoming a new object (which could also be a church)?
The sense of “same” invoked in this second kind of question means “one and the same,” that is numerical identity, rather than meaning “having all the same qualities,” or qualitative identity. We discussed a version of the second question involving the Ship of Theseus, where there are more than one candidate for being numerically identical to the original object, and some lines of reasoning would say the one candidate is the original ship, and other lines of reasoning would say the second candidate is the original.
One of the assignments for Friday is to watch this short video and continue to think about that puzzle:
- Watch Video on Ship of Theseus
I encourage you also to think of things you might say to avoid having to choose one of the candidates over the other. Is it plausible to say neither one is the original ship anymore, they’re both new ships? Is it plausible to say one is “numerically the same ship” in one sense and the other is “numerically the same ship” in another sense, and neither of these senses has priority? Is it plausible to say it depends on what we want from the ship, or how we feel about the ship? That we can decide which one to count as the same ship? Similar to how, if a church changed its name and leadership and I asked you whether it’s still the same church — whether there’s been one church that underwent those changes, or whether one church stopped existing and was replaced by a second one, you might feel that it’s up to us which of those is the better way to talk. We can decide what counts as “the same church.”
I don’t know which of these is the best thing to say about ships and churches. But it looks appealing to not have to choose one of the candidate ships as being definitely the original, and the other as definitely not. And it looks appealing to not have to give a definite yes-or-no answer to questions like Is this still one and the same church?
When it comes to parallel questions about persons, though, it’s going to be a lot harder to think there’s no definite answer. We’ll talk about this on Friday.
The second assignment for Friday is to watch this short video about what it takes to be a person (compare to What does it take to be a church?
):
I will post some more materials here by Friday, summarizing the past few class discussions and giving you more review materials for the quiz next Wednesday.
For Wednesday please read:
- Selections from Intro to David Shoemaker, Personal Identity and Ethics
As mentioned last week:
- On Fri Aug 29 starting at 2:30 pm, there is a Philosophy in 15 Minutes event, where members of our department give blitz-speed introductions to a few philosophical debates. Here are some recordings of past presentations. This will be held in Graham Memorial Hall 39.
If you’re interested, here is more about the film Moon I mentioned today in class. Here is some optional reading on cloning, cloning humans in particular, and here is a video about surprising ways that identical twins (and so also clones) really turn out to be different. (None of this is assigned/required. These are just links to follow up on if/when you have interest. Whenever I provide such links, I’ll say explicitly that they’re optional.)
On the topic of films, there is a series of philosophy-related films showing on campus. Here is the current schedule:
- Tue 26 Aug: Grizzly Man (2005), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 28 Aug: Blade Runner (1982), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Thu 4 Sept: Arrival (2016), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Thu 11 Sept: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Tue 23 Sept: A Serious Man (2009), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 25 Sept: Ikiru (1952), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Tue 30 Sept: Children of Men (2006), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 9 Oct: F for Fake (1973), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Tue 21 Oct: The Thing (1982), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 23 Oct: The Zone of Interest (2023), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Thu 30 Oct: The Conformist (1970), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Tue 4 Nov: The Third Man (1949), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 6 Nov: Nashville (1975), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Thu 13 Nov: Do the Right Thing (1989), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
- Tue 18 Nov: How Green Was My Valley (1941), at 6:30 pm in Davie 0112
- Thu 20 Nov: Harlan County, USA (1976), at 6:30 pm in Hanes Art Center 0121
The assigned reading for Monday is to continue reading the Terms & Methods pages and the two further texts:
For Monday, also watch this series of short videos:
As I said in class, the details of these aren’t important. We’re looking at them to get a sense of another way of thinking/talking about “identity” (or maybe it’s a family of several related ways of thinking/talking about identity), that we’re going to try to distinguish from the concept of identity our course explores.
Here is the sci-fi reading for Friday: from The Ophiuchi Hotline.
Our topics for Friday will be the debriefing about your discussion of the questions about the Egan article, plus your thoughts/reactions to the new sci-fi reading, plus we’ll start to review/field questions about the Terms & Methods pages. As I said in class today, I realize there’s a lot of reading on the table right now and I’m not expecting everybody to get through all of those Terms & Methods pages immediately. But do get started on them, and try to make enough progress that you can ask questions and benefit from class discussion of them on Friday and Monday. The most important of the Terms & Methods pages are the first three entries/links.
I will post a link and/or bring to class a handout pointing out the main ideas you should be developing an understanding of from reading those pages. You could use that as the start of notes for yourself, that you’re welcome to consult when we have a quiz on that material in two weeks.
In addition to the Terms & Methods pages, I asked you to read the first of these short texts:
When you do, also have a look also at the second page — which is also short. It will help you with the kind of task described in the Pojman reading. (That’s the author’s name.)
As I emailed you, our classroom will be changing to Wilson 217. We meet there starting tomorrow.