Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract

1. Derek Parfit's “reductionist” account of personal identity (including the rejection of anything like a soul) is coupled with the rejection of a commonsensical intuition of essential self-unity, as in his defense of the counter-intuitive claim that “identity does not matter.” His argument for this claim is based on reflection on the possibility of personal fission¹.
2. To the contrary, Simon Blackburn claims that the “unity reaction”² to fission has an absolute grip on practical reasoning.
3. Now David Lewis denied Parfit³'s claim that reductionism contravenes common sense, so I revisit the debate between Parfit⁴ and Lewis⁵, showing why Parfit⁶ wins it.
4. Is reductionism about persons then inherently at odds with the unity reaction⁷? Not necessarily; David Velleman presents a reductionist theory according to which fission does not conflict with the unity reaction⁸.
5. Nonetheless, relying on the distinction between person-level descriptions of first-person states and the first-person perspective⁹ itself, I argue that Velleman's theory does not eliminate fission-based conflict with the unity reaction¹⁰.