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The Transformations of Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge and Livingston College, Rutgers University

Extract

In Book IV of The Odyssey, Menelaus tells Telemachus as much as he knows of Odysseus' wanderings. He reports that Odysseus, wanting to learn the end of his travels and needing directions for returning safely home through the dangerous seas, captured Proteus and held fast to him, though Proteus transformed himself into a bearded lion, a snake, a leopard, a bear, running water and finally into a flowering tree. Proteus eventually wearied, and consented to tell Odysseus something of what he wished to know.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1973

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References

1 Cf. Williams, B. A. O., ‘Personal Identity and Individuation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVII, 19561957Google Scholar and ‘Are Persons Bodies?’ in The Philosophy of the Body, ed. Spicker, Stuart (Chicago, 1970)Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., ‘The Concept of a Person’, in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (New York, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shoemaker, S., Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Penelhum, T., Survival and Disembodied Existence (London, 1970).Google Scholar

2 Locke, , Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXVIIGoogle Scholar. Butler, , The Analogy of ReligionGoogle Scholar, Appendix I. For an excellent analysis of what can be said in Locke's defence, see Wiggins, David, ‘John Locke on Persons and their Memories: A Physicalist Account’, forthcoming.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Martin, C. B. and Deutscher, Max, ‘Remembering’, Philosophical Review, LXXV, 1966Google Scholar, and Shoemaker, S., ‘Persons and their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1970.Google Scholar

4 The richest documentation of this is, of course, Remembrance of Things Past. Even when Marcel recaptures the very taste of the madeleine, the memory carries resonances his experiences did not have: the resonance of all the intermediate experiences and the mediating search for the original. When he recaptures it, it is embedded at the core of the crystal that has grown around it; in a sense he has the original at the core, but he can never see it or savour it without the crystalline structure that has formed around it. See also Bradley, , Appearance and Reality (Oxford, 1920), 7173Google Scholar, and Hampshire, Stuart, ‘Dispositions and Memory’, Freedom of Mind (Princeton, 1971, 160182).Google Scholar

5 Cf. Shorter, J. M., ‘Personal Identity, Personal Relationships and Criteria’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 19701971Google Scholar, and Emmet, Dorothy, ‘Persons and Personae’, Rules, Roles and Relations (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

6 Hume, , Treatise, Book 2, Part IV, Ch. 6Google Scholar; Parfit, D., ‘Personal Identity’, Philosophical Review, 01, 1970Google Scholar; Perry, John, ‘Can the Self Divide?’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. LXIX, No. 16, 1972.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Wiggins, David, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford, 1967), see especially 4358.Google Scholar

8 I have tried to develop this argument in ‘Essential Possibilities in the Actual World’, The Review of Metaphysics, 1972.Google Scholar

9 For a firm and careful attempt to distinguish various types of criteria for identification, and to discuss their relationships, see Woods, M. J., ‘Identity and Individuation’, in Butler, R. (ed.) Analytical Philosophy, Second Series (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar

10 Cf. Wiggins, David, op. cit.Google Scholar, and Geach, Peter, ‘Identity’, The Review of Metaphysics, 21, 1967Google Scholar. Since the serious differences between Wiggins and Geach do not affect my analysis, I shall not discuss them here.

11 For an excellent analysis of Leibniz's position on identity, see Hacking, Ian, ‘Individual Substance’ in Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Frankfurt, Harry (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. Saul Kripke develops a closely related view in ‘Naming and Necessity’, Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Davidson, and Harman, (Dordrecht, Holland, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kripke shows how identity statements are corrigible.

12 It might be thought that the criteria for individual differentiation and re-identification would exhaust individual identification. But the characteristics that distinguish and re-identify individuals may be criteria that are not considered significant in identifying a person as the sort of person he essentially is. For instance, fingerprints may successfully differentiate and re-identify persons for some purposes, and yet an individual might consider himself, and be considered by others, as essentially unchanged even if we found some way of changing his fingerprints without scars.

13 Cf. Durkheim, E., The Rules of Sociological Method (Chicago, 1938).Google Scholar

14 Cf. Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of Person’, The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 I have argued a similar point in ‘Naturalism, Paradigms and Ideology’, The Review of Metaphysics, 1971.Google Scholar

16 Read, K., ‘Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama’, in Myth and Cosmos, ed. Middleton, John (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

17 The literature on this subject is vast. An excellent source is Magic, Witchcraft and Healing, ed. Middleton, John (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. For a subtle and brilliant analysis of the ramifications of such practices, see Humphrey, Caroline, Magical Drawings in the Religion of the Buryat, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1972.Google Scholar

18 Cf. Read, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Fortes, Meyer, ‘Totem and Taboo’, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1966.Google Scholar

19 Cf. Williams, B. A. O., op. cit. in n. 1.Google Scholar

20 This paper was originally read at meetings of the Moral Sciences Club at the University of Cambridge and the Philosophy Society of the University of Sussex. I am grateful to participants at these meetings for lively discussion and trenchant criticisms.