87:4 October 2004
Personal Identity

Advisory Editors: Dean Zimmerman, Rutgers, and Tamar Gendler, Cornell University

For the last three centuries, discussions of personal identity have taken a familiar form: both the basic space of positions (physical vs. psychological continuity) and the basic methodology (consideration of imaginary cases) can be traced back to Locke. But while ingenious arguments continue to be offered and refuted, the ground-level debate seems to the non-connoisseur to have reached something of a stalemate.

In response to this apparent deadlock, attention has turned to questions of methodology. Some have criticized the "method of cases"-- i.e., reliance upon our intuitions about personal identity in hypothetical cases as the primary test of proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for a person's persistence over time. They hold that this method is unsuitable for developing a positive theory of personal identity. Others have come to the method's defense, in more or less limited ways. Some have suggested that questions about personal identity are intertwined with issues in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Others insist that such topics are irrelevant to a problem they see as purely metaphysical.

This issue of The Monist will be devoted to discussions of the problem of personal identity -- that is, to discussions of the question of how the question ought properly to be approached. Authors need not remain agnostic on first-order questions about personal identity, but the primary focus of papers should be methodological.

Table of Contents:

David Braddon-Mitchell and Kristie Miller

How to be a Conventional Person

John Campbell

The First Person, Embodiment and the Certainty that One Exists

Matti Eklund

Personal Identity, Concerns, and Indeterminacy

Denis Robinson

Failing to Agree or Failing to Disagree? – Personal Identity Quasi-Relativism

Howard Robinson

Thought Experiments, Ontology and Concept-dependent Truthmakers

Carol Rovane

Alienation and the Alleged Separateness of Persons

Sydney Shoemaker

Brown and Brownson Revisited

David Wiggins

Reply to Shoemaker

Sydney Shoemaker

Reply to Wiggins

David Wiggins

Reply to Shoemaker