Personal Identity

What is a person? What makes me the same person today that I was yesterday or will be tomorrow? Philosophers have long pondered these questions. In Platos Symposium, Socrates observed that all of us are constantly undergoing change: we experience physical changes to our bodies, as well as changes in our manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, [and] fears. Aristotle theorized that there must be some underlying substratum that remains the same even as we undergo these changes. John Locke rejected Aristotles view and reformulated the problem of personal identity in his own way: is a person a physical organism that persists through time, or is a person identified by the persistence of psychological states, by memory? These essays - written by prominent philosophers and legal and economic theorists - offer valuable insights into the nature of personal identity and its implications for morality and public policy. Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Contributors
1. Experience, agency, and personal identity Marya Schechtman
2. When does a person begin? Lynne Rudder Baker
3. Persons, social agency, and constitution Robert A. Wilson
4. Hylemorphic dualism David S. Oderberg
5. Personal identity and self-ownership Edward Feser
6. Self-conception and personal identity: revisiting Parfit and Lewis with an eye on the grip of the unity reaction Marvin Belzer
7. The normativity of self-grounded reason David Copp
8. Rationality means being willing to say youre sorry Jennifer Roback Morse
9. Personal identity and postmortem survival Stephen E. Braude
10. The thing I am: personal identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare John Finnis
11. Moral status and personal identity: clones, embryos, and future generations F. M. Kamm
12. The identity of identity: moral and legal aspects of technological self-transformation Michael H. Shapiro.

Author/Editor Details
Edited by: Ellen Frankel Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Edited by: Fred D. Miller, Jr, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Edited by: Jeffrey Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio