Research Catalog

Title

Real people : personal identity without thought experiments / Kathleen V. Wilkes.

Author

Wilkes, Kathleen V.

Publication

Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1988.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 249 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

This book explores the scope and limits of the concept of a person. Questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation, Wilkes argues that such experimentation engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results, and that truth is anyway stranger than fiction. She then examines an assortment of real-life conditions, including fantasy, insanity and dementia, dissociated states, and split brains; questions the idea that people have some special kind of unity and continuity of consciousness; and looks at the views of the person as found in Homer, Aristotle, the post-Cartesians, and contemporary cognitive science.

Subject

• Bewusstsein Zusammenstellung
• Identity (Psychology)
• Consciousness
• Psychology, Pathological
• Psychology > Methodology
• Identification (Psychology)
• Identification, Psychological
• Consciousness
• Psychopathology
• Psychology > Methodology
• Psychology, Pathological
• Identität
• Persönlichkeit
• Bewusstsein
• Identiteit
• Filosofie van de geest
• Bewustzijn
• Gedachte-experimenten
• Persoonlijkheidsstoornissen

Note

• Includes index.

Bibliography (note)

• Bibliography: p. [235]-242.

Contents

• 1. Thought experiments. What thought experiments are -- First difficulty: the background -- Parenthesis: relevance and natural kinds -- Second difficulty: imagination and "possibility" -- Conditions of personhood -- The identification issue: laws and theoretical impossibilities -- The reindentification issue: more science fantasies -- Losing touch with reality -- A promissory note. 2. Infants and foetuses. Potentialities and interests -- Infants as fuzzy persons -- Failed potentials: the "Aristotelian principle" -- IVF embryos.
• 3. Mental deficiency, breakdown, and insanity. The sanity of irrationality -- What is mental illness? -- Contrasts with the psychopath -- The subnormal and the senile -- Speciesism. 4. Fugues, hypnosis, and multiple personality. The unity and continuity of consciousness -- Fugues and epileptic automatism -- Hypnosis -- Multiple personality: Christine Beauchamp -- How many Miss Beauchamps? -- Unity; and the Greeks. 5. Being in two minds. The problem introduced -- Our two brains -- Commissurotomy -- Philosophical perplexities -- The language of brains -- Some semi-parallels -- P.S.: an apparent exception -- Confabulation and the drive to minimize disunity -- How should we explain conflicts? -- Counting minds -- A final word on the brain.
• 6. The coherence of consciousness. Consciousness head-on -- Other times, other places -- The heterogeneity of consciousness -- Parenthesis: two paths to avoid -- Consciousness and the sciences -- 'Consciousness' in the vernacular -- Self-consciousness. 7. Models of mind. 'Models' -- Man in the Iliad -- Aristotle's man -- From 'psuche' to mind -- The domination of the mind -- The person as a computer.

ISBN

• 0198249551
• 9780198249559
• 0198240805
• 9780198240808

LCCN

88005313

OCLC

• ocm17650213
• 17650213
• SCSB-1748377

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library