Category
Personal identity
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Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies182 views -
I have forgotten most of my childhood. On Locke’s view, am I still that child?
I am on a gap year and reading whatever I can find. This week it was a summary of Locke on personal identity. As I understood it, Locke says you are the same person as far back as your consciousness reaches to…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies212 views -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics degree never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Nwosu4 replies144 views -
If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies204 views -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, and I'd like to hear the best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies192 views -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux. The Buddhist doctrine of…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies249 views -
Reading group: Yājñavalkya, Maitreyī and Gārgī in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
I left accountancy to raise two children in George Town, and I read Śaiva Siddhānta on my own. I want to go back behind the schools to the text they all argue over. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka is the oldest and, for me, the…
Started by Thamarai Selvi Raman5 replies218 views -
Iqbal’s khudi and Nietzsche’s Übermensch: influence or polemic?
Iqbal's Persian poem Asrar-i-Khudi (1915), translated by R. A. Nicholson as The Secrets of the Self (1920), makes the self, khudi, the centre of his philosophy. The self must be strengthened, disciplined and creatively asserted, not dissolved in mystical annihilation. Western readers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi4 replies244 views -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies158 views -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I'm a poet and a literature postgraduate in Kochi, new to formal philosophy. I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies196 views -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
I teach classical Chinese at a senior high school in Taipei. My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies158 views -
Thirty-four years as a GP: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I was a GP in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes with grief and sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies211 views -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong, and my working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies140 views -
Reading group: Augustine’s Confessions Book X, the books of memory, in Chadwick’s translation
There are already threads here on Book XI (time) and Book IV (the death of a friend), so I'd like to propose Book X, which sits between them and which I think is the most philosophical book of the Confessions. Having told…
Started by Aoife Brennan5 replies185 views -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies276 views -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies158 views -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially has life. The soul is not a ghost inside the body; it…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies190 views -
Is Yājñavalkya’s unseen seer an answer to the problem of personal identity?
I am doing an MA in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Pune, and something about how Indian theories of self get slotted into Western debates bothers me. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, Yājñavalkya says you cannot see the seer of seeing or think…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies202 views -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī0 replies72 views