Personal Identity. By Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne

1987 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-304
Author(s):  
George Graham ◽  
Ethics ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-643
Author(s):  
Reynolds B. Schultz

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-531
Author(s):  
Michael Levine

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. (i) Who is that is going to survive, and (ii) is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it.


1973 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-532
Author(s):  
Roland Puccetti

There has been a tendency in recent literature on personal identity to treat puzzle cases as unfair intrusions upon the discussion, like proposing to play chess without the Queen. Thus Terence Penelhum speaks of ‘imaginary worlds’ where our normal criteria do not hold and Sydney Shoemaker refers approvingly to G. C. Nerlich's dictum that it is a universal truth of our world, and not of ‘all possible worlds', that only by being identical with a witness to past events can one have the knowledge of them we have in memory.I would agree that where puzzle cases involve changing basic features of our physical universe, e.g. in having people's bodies go out of existence in one place and reappear in another, as recently envisaged by J. M. Shorter, there is some point in talking of ‘imaginary’ or ‘possible’ worlds. But where puzzle cases propose no such basic changes but ground the discussion in physiological possibilities, however unfeasible technologically, this seems an arbitrarily harsh description. It would be like Nineteenth Century philosophers saying talk of flying machines and heart transplants belongs, not to another age merely, but to other worlds.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Howell

Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ (IEM) has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether it constitutes an important status of judgments, whether it explains an important characteristic of judgments, or whether it merely marks an important characteristic of judgments. Nevertheless, reference to IEM abounds, making this obscure notion seem all the more significant.


PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 30 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Turner

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