Are Persons Identified Only by Reference to Their Bodies?

Abstract

The ‘obvious’ answer to the Unity Question is that two experiences are the same person’s experiences if they are experiences had by the same person. In the last chapter I asked whether it is not obvious (a) that the Unity Question is answered by answering the Identity Question, that is, by saying what we mean by ‘the same person’, and (b) that, people being creatures of flesh and blood, there is no problem about saying what we mean by ‘the same person’. We considered, very briefly, Descartes’s argument for our not being creatures of flesh and blood (or, rather, not essentially such creatures); and, at greater length, Ayer’s view that an answer to the Identity Question still leaves the way open for an answer, in terms of experiences being causally related to events in a brain, to the Unity Question. The discussion of Ayer’s view made evident the need for greater clarity about the logic of the language of experience. And to this we shall have to return.