BASR: Discourse Journal

Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Teaching Philosophy Historically: the Case of Personal Identity

Author: David Evans

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 7

Number: 1

Start page: 81

End page: 94

Return to vol. 7 no. 1 index page

1.

I want to consider how best to teach the history of philosophy. Since such teaching standardly takes place within the larger context of teaching philosophy, naturally there arise issues concerning the relation between philosophy and its history. But I shall focus here on the pedagogy itself. Interesting though the metaphilosophical issues are, I think that there is a contribution from actual teaching experience which may bring significant gains to the larger debate.

My case study concerns philosophical teaching on personal identity. This topic features in many introductory courses. It is a very natural topic to present to students beginning philosophy; they are easily interested in it, and the issues raised in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and ethics are extensive and fruitful. In later, higher-level courses personal identity is normally a much more peripheral topic, perhaps featuring as a topic within a larger course on ontology or philosophy of mind. There is also the further possibility that the teacher will revisit the topic of personal identity in a more explicitly historical context. That is the theme which I want to explore in this case study. How do students who approach personal identity in a problembased and non-historical manner come to understand the topic, by contrast with those who encounter it historically? As regards the latter group I shall concentrate on two periods of philosophical history.the seventeenth century, when John Locke raised pertinent issues to which Butler, Reid and Hume responded and which still resonate in contemporary debate, and the fourth century BCE when Plato sought to cast light on the simultaneous unity and diversity within a social organisation or a state, by exploring what he argued is a parallel situation within the individual person.

Elsewhere I have argued that where teaching introductory philosophy is concerned, the problem-based approach is preferable.¹ Of course, the historical approach is valid and indeed necessary if the focus of interest is explicitly the philosophy of Locke or Plato. However my thesis is that if we consider the mass of philosophy students, generalising over special factors in their programme, problems rather than history will provide a more effective mode of entry for their philosophical education.

Cultural considerations have a bearing on the way in which an area of philosophy or particular topics within it may best be approached. As it happens, personal identity provides an excellent example. In recent times notable contributions to current philosophical debate on the topic have come from African philosophers such as Segun Gbadegesin and Kwame Gyekye, writing on the Yoruba and the Akan concepts of a person.² In this work philosophical discussion is enriched by culture-specific ideas which have not figured in the earlier philosophical tradition. These ideas do indeed come from a tradition, but it is not one in the mainstream of philosophy. The modern step has been to bring such concepts into philosophical use; and that could not happen if the terms of the debate were constrained by the history of philosophy.

Two major themes are likely to enter modern philosophical discussion of personal identity. The first concerns the identity of the person; the second the unity of the person. I shall consider each theme, first as to how it can be taught in a contemporary and non-historical context, secondly as to how it ought to be approached through the history of philosophy. My aim is to exhibit the difference between the two approaches and their results, so that we can get a clearer sense of their respective strengths and merits.

2.

Questions about personal identity ask what it is that sets a particular individual person apart from everything else.from other individual persons and from all else in the non-personal realm. Genetic science is clearly of very limited help here. It seems that in terms of genomic constitution every human being is 99.9% identical to every other one, the last 0.1% contributing the personal individuality.³ We humans are even 97% identical to nematode worms, I am told. Well, each of us has a head, which is the front of the creature, and a foot or tail, which is the creature's other end. But these facts about genetics do not really tell us much about the identity of an individual person.

For further insight we need to go to psychology and consider such factors as habits of character and the contents of minds. For even the identity of physically identical twins does not count significantly as personal identity. Separated as they are in space over a lengthy period of time, their psychologies are bound to diverge, so that in terms of their mentality there is no semblance of identity. But there is a difficulty with mental characteristics; they seem to lack the capacity for individuation which is possessed by physical characteristics. Suppose that we were to have psychologically identical twins; their thoughts and desires are precisely matched both in general terms and in particular detail. The question is whether such minds could indeed be twins, that is two. To be sure the bodies and brains in which they are tokened are two. But since what interests us is the minds themselves, it seems to follow from the identity of psychological content between our twins that they are completely indistinguishable.

Considerations of identity at a time favour bodies rather than minds as the fundamental units. But when we go on to consider identity over time.that is, persistence and survival, possibly through great changes.matters become more complicated. Suppose, as in the famous thought experiments,⁴ two conscious human beings undergo a process such that the mind (thoughts, memories, personality) which was formerly associated with one of the bodies is now associated with the other, while a reverse change has occurred with the other mind and body. Such stories can be told in various ways. Some of them support the conclusion that what we have here is a radical mental and personal dislocation of two human beings; this version assumes that the body is the location of personal identity. However a more normal construal of these fantasies is to see them as presenting a situation in which two persons exchange bodies. There is strong mental continuity between the experiences of the inhabitants of what is first one body and then a completely different one; and this can convince us that the identity of the person has crossed between the two bodies rather than remaining with each original body through its radically changed mental nature.

Thought experiments in this genre have been used to support the proposal that the identity of a person is not tied even to existence as a human being.⁵ Just as the identity of a person might persist, through mental links, between the bodies of a prince and a cobbler, so it could also survive transmission from human biological existence to that of an extraterrestrial alien or even to a non-biological intelligence created by artificial technology. By such steps in argument there opens up the interesting possibility of linking a resurgent dualism in the theory of personal identity, with the natural inclination of many students to embrace an anti-speciesist, animal-friendly view of the value of life.

In introductory philosophy teaching, attention is concentrated primarily on the nature of a person and on the range of what is to count as a person. So questions of the nature of the mind and the body, their relative importance and the relations between the two, are highly salient, and so also are issues concerning the status, as regards personhood, of defective humans, higher animals, aliens and gods. Onto reflections on these issues, which have immediate appeal to students starting philosophy, we graft more abstract and sophisticated thoughts about identity. Identity is a peculiar and puzzling relation, but plausibly it has the characteristics of being absolute, or all-or-nothing, and also transitive. If something which we specify as 'A' is claimed to be identical to something specified as 'B', then there can be no distinction whatsoever in the characteristics that are true of A and B. Thus for the city of Dakar and the capital of Senegal to be the same, nothing can be true of the one which does not equally hold true of the other; and similarly for the personal identity that there is between the present author and the Professor of Logic & Metaphysics, Queen's University Belfast. Difference to any extent, however small, means total difference.

Transitivity requires that if Ais the same as B and B the same as C, then A is the same as C; any failure of identity between A and C entails that there is similarly a failure between at least one of the pairs AB and BC. Absoluteness and transitivity are closely connected features of the logic of identity. Technical as they may seem, these thoughts add spice to the puzzles about personal identity that we can serve up to our students as they begin philosophy. Two brief examples illustrate this point. If we suppose that physical continuity is the basis of ongoing personal identity, we have to confront the fact that the physical constituents of a person are replaced over time. Just as identical twins are not identical because their bodies are made up of different parts, so if we replace all or most of the parts of something with new parts, however similar, the result is a different object. It is normally accepted that a gradual and piecemeal replacement of parts does not upset an object's ongoing identity. However if we insist on the absolute and transitive character of the identity relation, even a slight change of parts disables identity. No object can persist the same as itself if its material constitution changes to any degree.⁶

This result makes severe difficulties for any physicalist conception of personal identity. But the same considerations also damage the alternative psychological account. For it is memory which provides the most plausible mental link between the stages of a person over time. Yet not only do memories fade, thereby weakening the transitivity of the connection which is required for identity. Even very recent memories lack the content of the earlier memories of yet earlier mental states; and so the memory criterion also fails to deliver absolute, all-ornothing identity.7

3.

This is the kind of material which, I believe, should fill a sound introductory course in philosophy. How well does such an approach match a historical treatment of these topics? The philosopher whose work it most obviously recalls is John Locke, with his famous thought experiments involving mental connections and continuity between two completely different bodies.⁸ Locke is convinced that if I have memory connections and strong similarity of character with someone who lived many centuries ago and so died long before I was born, I am the same person as that earlier human; and conversely if there is an absence of this kind of mental connection between different stages of one human life, then the later person and the earlier person are not identical. Locke acknowledged that these claims are paradoxical and are open to abuse when called in support of amnesiac drunken behaviour, for example; yet he cites our attitudes to the responsibility.or rather, lack of responsibility.of the insane, to reinforce his elevation of the importance of mental over physical connectedness. Like many modern commentators on these issues, Locke's concerns are both analytical and normative. He wants to clarify our conceptual tools but also, on the basis of that increased insight, to improve our practical attitudes.⁹

So far this puts Locke firmly in line with the philosophical approach which is embedded in the course for introductory students. But of course this commentary has omitted material that lies at the heart of Locke's concerns. His famous chapter in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II 27) is about our idea of identity. He starts by distinguishing what we may call basic and sortal identity. One form of question is: what is it for something to be or remain the same? A plausible answer is that it consists of exactly the same constituent atoms. The strategy, in both question and answer, is to construe identity without reference to any further qualification; and it can reappear, with similar plausibility, in enquiries about simple spiritual substances, such as souls.

Locke does not rule out this intellectual concern with basic identity. But he uses it as a foil for the aspect of our idea of identity which interests him.namely the identity which comes into play when we couple it with other ideas. According to this conception, to be the same is to be the same so-and-so; for example, if we ask whether this person is the same as that one, the grammar of the sentence indicates that our question is whether the one is the same person as the other. In more recent discussion this notion of identity has been called 'relative identity'.¹⁰ Locke uses it to show, first, that whether A is the same living creature as B is a different question from whether it is the same amount of matter and, secondly, that whether C is the same person as D is a different question from whether it is the same living creature.

In all of this Locke's primary interest is in identity as such. He is concerned to distinguish absolute from relative identity, arguing that both form part of what we mean when we speak of things being the same or different. Personal identity provides an interesting and challenging case where the full resources of a properly conceived theory of identity can sustain a particular set of views about the nature of a person. But the particular claims about persons are intended to support the more general theory of identity, not vice versa.

Locke's work in this area was widely influential. His discussion of personal identity was taken up, over the following century, by Joseph Butler, David Hume and Thomas Reid (among others).¹¹ They had various motives for interest in the human self, ranging from theological to epistemological, and they by no means endorsed Locke's position on the subject. However in all cases their discussions gained sharpness and focus as a result of Locke's analysis of identity. A historical examination of philosophical theories of personal identity would cover all this ground, as well as Kantian discussion of the ontological status of the human subject. This is valuable pedagogy; but it is clearly separated by some distance from the problem-focused course material which I went through earlier. The approaches are distinct, and their distinctness needs to be acknowledged.

4.

A second aspect of personal identity which can properly find a place in introductory courses concerns intra-personal conflict of motivation. We sometimes do things which we know to be wrong. But how can this occur, if the realisation that some action is good gives us the strongest possible reason to do that? We can refine this problem in the face of various deflationary strategies which focus on the concepts of knowledge and goodness. Whatever refinement is made in these areas, there is a residual issue about human actions and their bases in understanding and will. This is fertile ground for engaging the philosophical attention of new students.¹²

Of course, it too has its origins in the history of philosophy. specifically in the Socratic paradoxes about the relation between knowledge and action and in the reactions of Plato and Aristotle to Socrates' views. But again I draw a distinction between a problemoriented treatment of these issues and one that attends primarily to the historical record. Consider first what is most appropriate for introducing new philosophy students to this area. My experience tells me that it is the tension between wanting to do something and knowing that it is wrong (or wanting to not do it and knowing that it is right). Students may not at first feel any problem here; and this is probably because they take a heteronomous view of morality. For these students, morality is external to their desires; so either they are bound by it despite their desires or their desires will trump its inconvenient dictates. Either way they see no significant problem.

Progress with students will be made if they can come to see two things: first, that what is to be counted as good requires intellectual and emotional endorsement on the part of the human subject; secondly, that if we are to focus our desires effectively, an understanding of several potentially remote factors may be required. For example, should a 30- year-old person make an undertaking to denote organs or tissues in a death situation which putatively lies 40-50 years ahead? An effective, sustainable answer to such a question will depend both on the agent's emotional engagement with a temporally remote phase of his existence and on an understanding of something that is far away from immediately present experience. Having awakened in the student a sense of his full moral autonomy, we can proceed to explore cases where there appears to be an internal conflict of motivation. Here very useful support can be provided by Plato's account of the three parts of the soul. In Republic book 4 Plato uses.indeed, introduces.the principle of non-contradiction to support the general conclusion that where a person is both attracted to and repelled by some option, it cannot be precisely the same part of the person that simultaneously feels both effects. On this basis he distinguishes three parts.reason, which calculates what is good, desire, which pursues pleasure, and spirit, which embraces honour.¹³

The divided soul can make a strong appeal to students, particularly if they are familiar with the ideas of Freud and other psychoanalysts. ¹⁴ In teaching about personal identity we can best use Plato's discussion as a springboard in two directions. First, it focuses attention on what precisely is involved in prephilosophical thought about moral conflict. Is it plausible to make reason and desire the elements in that conflict? Is it not rather the case that both elements are needed on each side? For it seems that neither reason without desire nor desire without reason is sufficient to generate action. If that thought is right, we can explore whether either element has an intrinsic tendency to be dominant. One answer leads to the intellectualism of Socrates, the other to the emotionalism of David Hume; and between them the two answers define what Michael Smith has called 'the moral problem'.15 We are also well placed to discuss the philosophical conundrum of akrasia.weakness of will, which Aristotle derived from these very discussions in the pages of his predecessor Plato.

A second line of enquiry that Plato's ideas can readily suggest to students concerns the reflexivity of thoughts and desires. In addition to simply wanting or not wanting something, a person can want to want or not to want.or not want to want or not to want.that thing.¹⁶ Plato distinguishes his third part of the soul.spirit.by contrasting its emo- tional reaction to something with a contrary simple desire for that thing. As a plausible alternative analysis, it might be claimed that the person wants something, on the one hand, but also wants not to want that very same thing. There is no contradiction between these attitudes; so Plato's argument for the fragmentation of the person cannot proceed. But we can still press the issue with regard to wanting not to want or not wanting to want something. What does such a subject actually want? If the person is fundamentally unitary, there must be an answer to this question. Similar problems arise when we consider the reflexivity of knowledge or belief. Socrates claimed that he was wiser than everyone else just because he, like them, was generally ignorant; he at least knew that he knew nothing, while they did not even know that.¹⁷ One can be ignorant or mistaken as to what one knows or does not know.

These are some of the themes and problems that arise when we pursue the idea of fragmenting the unit that is a person. Plato argues the case for fragmentation, based on the contradictory interests of the parts of the soul which he distinguishes. As we develop these ideas in introductory philosophy teaching, we may well emphasise, against Plato's analysis, that each person really is a unit; but we should also explore the problems that arise for those who want to maintain this when faced with difficulties over weakness of will and also when we consider how intellectual and emotional attitudes can be directed upon themselves. Whereas in the earlier Lockean material we concentrated on some particular candidate for being the basic bearer of personal identity, we now show the problems that lie in supposing that any one of these elements can be a genuine unit.

5.

What then of the historical basis for this line of philosophical enquiry? One crucial element in Plato's account which we have so far ignored entirely is the political dimension. His account of the individual person is strictly parallel to an analysis of the distinct elements in a whole society.¹⁸ The overall strategy in his Republic is to discover the nature of the good life by examining how things go well on the grand scale of an entire state. The strategy depends on the thesis that exactly the same moral concepts are instantiated in an individual person and in a whole social organisation; both of these can be just or wise, and so an understanding of the nature of these qualities in either entity can be carried over without remainder to the other.¹⁹ This is a stronger and more paradoxical claim that might be supposed. It is not that appropriate social conditions facilitate the emergence of individuals of certain types. Rather the idea is that the very same quality is present in society and in the individual person.

This idea has important consequences not only for moral psychology but also for political theory. In the Republic Plato uses the separation of classes in the state to develop a taxonomy of constitutions; and this classification is taken up, with extensive modifications and refinements, in the political theorising of Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero.²⁰ At the base of the theorising in these later thinkers there lies Plato's idea that humans are essentially social creatures, so that an account even of an isolated individual person which leaves out the political dimension must be deficient. Plato took this idea to the extreme of regarding a state as a super-individual and an individual as a mini-state; but this should not obscure the fact without Plato's theorising we would not have anything like our present justification for regarding political theory as a part of moral philosophy; and without that moral dimension, politics would likely not even be a part of philosophy. ²¹

Aristotle was a major inheritor of this important element in Plato's work. He also puzzled over the problems for the unity of the person that were bequeathed by Plato's theory of the tripartite soul, examining them in the different contexts of moral theory and natural psychology. Although his responses were rather different in these two contexts, in both cases he saw the need to give an account which both recognised the distinctness of different psychic functions and also reflected the unity of a being which possesses these distinct functions.²²Here is an example from his natural psychology. Sensation is clearly a distinct function from thought, since some animals exercise the first but not the second. Therefore that complexity has to be recognised in our analysis even of those animals, such as human beings, which exercise both functions. At the same time the account for these latter creatures must reflect the connection between the exercise of the two functions. In the present case this condition will be satisfied, roughly speaking, if we acknowledge the conceptual character of human sensation: we see our sense-data as cats or tables, in a way that cats do not and cannot.²³ Thus Plato's discussion of the tripartite soul in Republic 4 connects with a number of topics and philosophers which do not.and, I would maintain, should not.get mentioned or discussed in a general introductory course on personal identity. But in a course which directs attention precisely on Plato as a figure in the history of philosophy, with his own identity and progeny, the topics which I have just indicated are entirely appropriate.

6.

Let me draw some strands together. I have outlined certain topics and arguments which I would insert into an effective course, for students coming to philosophy for the first time, on the general theme of personal identity and the nature of persons. These topics are grounded in certain seminal discussions by philosophers who feature in the long tradition of our vocation, in this particular case, John Locke and Plato. Without their contributions these particular themes might well not have entered philosophy; at least they would have done so in very different form. However we need to exercise pedagogical care as we construct the students' menus and meals. My examination of the two cases has shown that the best teaching will follow rather different routes depending on whether the course focuses on the issues, as they are most likely to interest a beginning student, or on the material in its historical context, including its immediate influence. This does not mean that one type of teaching is to be privileged over the other. That is a separate issue, which I have not addressed here. My present point, and the lesson which I draw from my case studies, is that we need to be sensitive to the distinction between the two types of teaching and their aims. I believe that those who devise and deliver philosophy courses are not always as alert to the distinction as they might be. If so, this paper will have covered useful ground.²⁴

Endnotes

David Evans, 'Teaching Introductory Philosophy: Problems or Traditions?', in D.Evans & I.Kucuradi (eds.), Teaching Philosophy on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (Ankara, 1998), pp.207-20.
S.Gbadegesin, African philosophy. Traditional Yoruba Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), esp. pp.27-59; K.Gyekye An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
I exaggerate, but to good rhetorical effect. It now seems (scientific and journalistic reports, November 2006) that genetically every human being is 99.7% identical to every other and 97% identical to a chimpanzee. Clearly the 'identity' involved here has little to do with personal identity.
From a vast literature I select B.Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp.1-81; J.Perry, Personal Identity (University of California Press, 1975); D.Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984); S.Shoemaker, Identity, Cause and Mind (Oxford University Press, 2003).
See T.Nagel, 'What is it like to be a bat?', repr. in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979, pp. 165-80; F.Jackson, 'What Mary didn't know', Journal of Philosophy 86 (1986), pp. 291-5.
This line of thought was raised in philosophy and its pedagogy by Chrysippus; see A.A.Long & D.N.Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1987) vol.1, pp.171-2, 175-6, and vol.2, p.177. It carries on into the medieval tradition, in the writings of William of Shyreswoode, and was famously developed by Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore II 11 (transl. W.Molesworth, vol.1, pp.135-8). As a technical issue it persists in current metaphysics. For a good summary of views, and a trenchant account of his own position, see M.B.Burke, 'Dion and Theon: an Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle', Journal of Philosophy 94 (1994), pp. 129-39
For this topic, see the bibliography in n.4 above and also D.Lewis, 'Survival and Identity', repr. in Philosophical Papers, vol.1 (Oxford, 1983), pp.55-77.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II xxvii, with comments by E.J.Lowe, Locke on Human Understanding (Routledge, 1995), pp.93-118.
For the normative dimension, see D.Parfit (op. cit.), pp.321-47.
P.T.Geach, 'Identity', repr. in Logic Matters (Blackwell, 1972), pp.238-47; E.J.Lowe (op. cit.) pp.96-7.
J.Perry (op. cit.), pp.99-118, 159-76.
For good introductions to the topic, see W.Charlton, Weakness of Will (Blackwell, 1988); A.O.Rorty, 'Akrasia and Pleasure: Nicomachean Ethics Book 7' in A.O.Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (University of California Press, 1980), pp.267-84.
Rep. 439-41. For recent discussion, see M.Burnyeat, 'The truth of tripartition',
Aristotelian Society Proceedings (2006), 1-23.
See R.Wollheim & J. Hopkins, Philosophical Essays on Freud (Cambridge: 1982), especially the essays by David Pears and Donald Davidson, pp.264-305.
M.Smith, The Moral Problem (Blackwell, 1994), pp.11-12.
H.Frankfurt, 'Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person', Journal of Philosophy 71 (1971), 5-20.
Plato Apology 21d; see C.D.C.Reeve, Socrates in the Apology (Hackett, 1989), pp.33-7.
Republic 368d-9a ; the difficulties in this approach are well exposed by Aristotle, especially in Politics B3.
Republic 441c-d.
Plato Republic 544; Aristotle Politics ƒ¡7-8. For Polybius, Cicero and other later political thinkers in classical antiquity, see F.W.Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley, 1972, pp.130-7); A.Lintott, 'The theory of the mixed constitution at Rome', in J.Barnes & M.Grifffin (eds.), Philosophia Togata II (Oxford, 1997), pp.70-85.
This crucial element in the tradition comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics K10, esp. 1179b31-80a14.
De Anima B3, 414b20-32, and for the connection to politics see Politics ƒ¡1, 1275a33-b5. See also A.C.Lloyd, 'Genus, Species and Ordered Series in Aristotle', Phronesis 7 (1962), 67-90.
De Anima ƒ¡1, 425a24-7.
24 This paper was first presented to a conference, supported by UNESCO and FISP,in Dakar, Senegal, in January 2006. I should like to acknowledge the help of Semou Pathe Gueye, Marcel Dascal and William McBride, on that occasion and others, in fruitful discussion of these ideas.

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