文档介绍：: Problems of Philosophy
Prof. Sally Haslanger
October 15, 2001
Personal Identity I
There are several questions that might arise concerning personal identity. When we ask "Who am I?" we might be
wondering about what "makes us tick", what we ultimately value, what matters to us. We might also be asking what sort of
being we are, what our possibilities are, under what conditions "I" would continue to exist. We'll begin our discussion of
personal identity with the latter set of questions.
Consider a parallel set of questions:
(Id) Under what conditions are baseball-events events in the same game? ., under what conditions are a
particular batter batting and a particular runner running parts of the same game?
Break (I) into two questions. First, the question of synchronic identity:
(SI) Under what conditions are simultaneous baseball-events events in the same game?
Let a baseball "stage" consist of all the events at a given time that are part of a single game. Then we can formulate the
question of diachronic identity as follows:
(DI) Under what conditions are two baseball stages stages in the same game? ., what makes the beginning of
the third inning and the end of the eighth inning stages of the very same baseball game?
Restate the questions for persons:
Synchronic identity: under what conditions are two simultaneous person-ev