Personal Identity

This week and next week we’re going to try to think about what makes you a person and whether and why you are the same person who received the birth certificate with your name on it a couple of decades ago, or the person who celebrated their tenth birthday roughly halfway in between. We’ll be particularly interested in how you should feel about the possibility that you might turn into a zombie, and in the relationship between zombies and the people who turned into them.

For a change of pace, I’m going to give different readings to different groups of you different readings for this week, and then in class we’ll bring them together and talk about how they are related to one another. Next week we’ll read a longer piece of contemporary (last fifty years) philosophy that was inspired by all three of our readings for this week.

Buddhism and No-Self or Non-Self

Our main reading for today is CHAPTER 3 of Mark Siderits’ book Buddhism as Philosophy. I am asking everyone to do this reading for the week. If you are interested in getting more background on Buddhism or Buddhist thought, it will about double your reading if you also read the first two chapters as an introduction, but they are not part of the assigned reading for the week. Siderits is a contemporary secondary source who is trying to give an introduction to historical Buddhist philosophical ideas about the self and who explicitly discusses one of our other readings for this week in detail and compares it explicitly to another.

The Questions of King Milinda

This is a Buddhist dialogue that dates to roughly two thousand years ago. We will be reading a selection. In particular, you will be reading it if your last name starts with A-G. This is the main Buddhist text that Siderits discusses in the second half of his chapter.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Yes, this is the same John Locke who we read before. If your last name starts with H-P, you will read Book II, Chapter 27 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to see what he has to say about the significance of consciousness in personal identity.

David Hume on the Self

The Scottish Philosopher David Hume, writing after and with knowledge of Locke, also commented on the self or personal identity, but had a more skeptical view. If your last name starts with Q-Z, then you will read selections from his Treatise of Human Nature.