Abstract
Debate about the meaning and identity of persons is intricate and vexed. Recently, it has been much invigorated by Derek Parfit,1 who offers a powerful new challenge to the notion that personal identity is continuous over time. Parfit suggests that there is no more to a person than psychological and physical connectedness, and, like nations, people are subject to changing boundaries. Consequently, it is reasonable to propose that we can be different persons at different times in our lives.
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Notes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 49 ff.
Various scholars stress this general emphasis. Besides Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 51 ff., et passim, see R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer, Respect for Persons (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 18 ff.
Jonathan Glover, I. The Philosophy of Personal Identity (London: Allen Lane, 1988): this study develops Parfit’s arguments in a direction situating the person historically;
Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’, trans. W. D. Halls, The Category of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1 ff.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1964. First published, 1958)
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially Part I, ‘Contingency’, pp. 3–69. Interrelations between philosophy of mind in the Lockean tradition and an evaluative, broadly hermeneutical stance are intricate, but beyond the scope of this study.
For alternative approaches, see for instance Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981)
Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984);
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self. Philosophical Papers 1956–72 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
See especially Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 161 ff.
Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 166.
George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). p. 86.
See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), pp. 1 ff.
For a cautionary reaction to Snell, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 158 ff.
See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 3 vols. The tension between the present and the allure of the ‘not yet’ is the leitmotif of Bloch’s thinking.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965). Page numbers to this edition are cited in the text.
See Dolores J. Palomo, ‘The Dutch Connection: The University of Leiden and Swift’s Academy of Lagado’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 41 (1977–78), 27–35.
See David Renaker, ‘Swift’s Laputans as a Caricature of the Cartesians’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 94 (1979), 936–44; Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, ‘The Scientific Background to Swift’s Voyage to Laputa’, and ‘Swift’s “Flying Island” in The Voyage to Laputa’, Annals of Science II (1937), 299–34 and 405–30.
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 113.
For an account of this attachment, the ‘balance of power’ and lack of autonomy, see Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), pp. 161 ff.
Dennis Todd, ‘Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science’, Studies in Philology 75 (1978), 114.
J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, J. M. Synge. Collected Works, vol. IV, Plays, Book II (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 51 ff. References to this edition are cited in the text.
John Butler Yeats, Essays Irish and American (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. First published, 1919), p. 58. Of the supposed murder, Yeats claims ‘No one really believes it’, and Christy’s ‘talk about the murder is a sudden freak of self-advertisement’, part of the trials of ‘a young poet in the supreme difficulty of getting born’.
C. C. Innes, ‘Naked Truth, Fine Clothes and Fine Phrases in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World’, ed. Joseph Ronsley, Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1977), pp. 67 ff., stresses the ‘anti-poetic’ character of Old Mahon.
See for instance ‘Possible Remedies’, ed. Alan Price, J. M. Synge: Collected Works, Vol. II, Prose (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 339–43.
The contrast between fantasy and realism is dealt with frequently, but see especially Edward Hirsch, ‘The Gallous Story and the Dirty Deed: the Two Playboys’, Modern Drama 26, no. 1 (1983), 85–102.
See James Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971).
Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 130.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1960).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), and especially the famous Chapter XI, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, pp. 206–31.
Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text. A Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), ‘Post-Structuralism: An Introduction’, p. 8.
As Paul Ricœur points out. See for instance ‘Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics’, in Paul Ricœur. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 165 ff.
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© 1992 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1992). Introduction. In: Literature and Personal Values. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22116-5_1
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