Real People 'Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments'

By Kathleen V. Wilkes

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198240805
• ISBN13: 9780198240808
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"