Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments (

ISBN: 0198240805

Author: Wilkes, Kathleen V.

Condition: new

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.