Mudei
Este blog foi um diário público de uma brevíssima pesquisa. Por um breve tempo pensei em escrever minha monografia de conclusão de curso a respeito do tema tratado neste blog, mas por conta de diversas séries causais fui levado a outras aspirações. Mantenho este blog online pela simples razão de não ter encontrado site algum com mais conteúdo sobre o assunto para pesquisadores lusófonos. Agradeço pela atenção. Boa noite e boa sorte.
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De Descartes a Farrell
I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know? (Descartes 1641)
The soul, so far as we can conceive it, is nothing but a system or train of different perceptions. (Hume 1739)
What was I before I came to self-consciousness? . . . I did not exist at all, for I was not an I. The I exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself. . . . The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists. (Fichte 1794–5)
The ‘Self’ . . . , when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of . . . peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat. (James 1890)
The ego continuously constitutes itself as existing. (Husserl 1929)
Any fixed categorization of the Self is a big goof. (Ginsberg 1963)
The self which is reflexively referred to is synthesized in that very act of reflexive self-reference. (Nozick 1981)
The self . . . is a mythical entity. . . . It is a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates ‘my self’ from ‘myself’ to generate the illusion of a mysterious entity distinct from . . . the human being. (Kenny 1988]
A self . . . is . . . an abstraction . . . , [a] Center of Narrative Gravity. (Dennett 1991)
My body is an object all right, but my self jolly well is not! (Farrell 1996)
Citações emprestadas do artigo ‘The Self‘ de Galen Strawson.
Filed under: Dennett, Descartes, Fichte, Ginsberg, Hume, Husserl, James, Kenny, Nozick, identidade pessoal | Leave a Comment
The great puzzle
I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, cap 2.
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Bibliografias
Abaixo os links para as bibliografias acerca de identidade pessoal e temas afins, organizadas por David Chalmers e Shaun Gallagher, respectivamente.
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O “eu” empirista: Parte II
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Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 25-27.
Identity is “the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances.” As a term in philosophy identity used to apply mainly to the unity of objects, especially through an expanse of time: “a single object, plac’d before us, and survey’d for any time without our discovering in it any interruption or variation, is able to give us a notion of identity.” The word did not take on its current psychological denotation, it did not begin to be applied to the self, until the unity of the self became problematic. As long as men believed in a soul created and sustained (continuously known and seen) by God, there could be no question about the unity of the self. It is significant that identity is first used to mean personal identity by the empiricist philosophers Locke and Hume, who use the word identity to cast doubt on the unity of the self. The term in this sense is not used by Descartes, who might be considered the founder of modern philosophy and the last philosopher to take the unity of the self as axiomatic. But Descartes’ “I think, hence I am” so amputates the self by reducing it to consciousness that, despite his intention to substantiate the self, Descartes has probably done more than Locke and Hume to kill it off, as Beckett’s use of Descartes suggests. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers I shall discuss recur to one or another of these Enlightenment philosophers or their successors (Bradley on his empiricist side serves Eliot the way Locke and Hartley serve Wordsworth), as defining the self in a way they both accept and resist.
Hume, in his section “Of Personal Identity,” [in Treatise of Human Nature] raises most of the issues about identity that I shall discuss in this book. “There are some philosophers,” Hume begins,
who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.
But the self, Hume argues, is not experienced. What we experience are successive, changing impressions all of which are supposed to refer to the self:
Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea.
The issue here, which we will see repeated over and over, is whether we experience successive selves rather than any one self.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” The self then is equivalent to the contents of its perceptions and ceases to exist when it ceases to perceive, as in sleep or death. Hume has no concept of unconsciousness, and therefore does not allow for a sense of self in sleep or dreams.
We “are nothing,” he says, “but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
We arrive at the sense of self through error, through the process of association; we pass insensibly from the idea of succession to the idea of identity, because the imagination feels the same in conceiving these opposite ideas (here Hume anticipates nineteenth-century dialectical thinking). In order to justify this absurdity, “we feign the continu’d existence of the perception of our senses, to remove the interruption,” or we imagine “something unknown and mysterious, connecting the parts” (here Hume anticipates romantic organicism), and thus “run into the notion of a soul, and self … to diguise the variation.” The self, in other words, is a necessary fiction. Hume anticipates and rejects the dialectical logic and the organicism by which later generations will try to solve the problem of the self as he defines it.
Hume concludes that identity is not in the different perceptions themselves, uniting them, “but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them.” The self is a retrospective construction of the imagination, and for this reason “memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production.” Only through memory can we create the self by seeing continuity between past and present perceptions; only through memory can we conceive “that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.” Hume does not deny the self as an operative presence; like Locke he insists that it is a fabrication achieved through association, imagination, memory – especially memory. … Memory above all [is] the creator, the artist-fabricator, of self.
Filed under: Beckett, Bradley, Descartes, Eliot, Hartley, Hume, Locke, Wordsworth, bundle theory, identidade pessoal, memória, reducionismo | Leave a Comment
Anatta: a doutrina do “não-eu”
O que segue é a porção maior do capítulo VI do livro What The Buddha Taught do venerável Walpola Rahula, considerado por muitos um dos melhores livros introdutórios escritos sobre budismo, especialmente Theravada. Neste ele expõe a doutrina do não-eu (anatta em Pali, anatman em Sânscrito), que é — como o próprio nome diz — uma doutrina reducionista acerca da identidade pessoal, que tem algumas similaridades com outras doutrinas reducionistas propostas no ocidente. Este capítulo me parece uma boa e didática introdução ao tema e é leitura recomendada a qualquer pessoa que se interesse pelo problema da identidade pessoal e sua história. Como é um texto cunho religioso, peço que tenham isso em mente ao lerem-no. Fiz algumas pequenas correções à tradução e adicionei links que podem ajudar aqueles que não possuem familiaridade com o vocabulário. Meus agradecimentos ao site Shunya por disponibilizar este e outros textos.
O que sugerem, geralmente, as palavras Alma, Eu, e Ego, ou para empregar a palavra sânscrita Atman, é que existe no homem uma entidade permanente, eterna e absoluta, que é uma substância imutável por trás do mundo fenomenal em mudança.
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O “eu” empirista: Parte I
Michael Ayers, professor emérito em Oxford, é um dos principais comentadores contemporâneos de Locke. O que segue é uma entrevista com ele feita por Bryan Magee. A referência é:
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Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, Dialogue 6: Michael Ayers on John Locke, pp.134-6.
Magee: The body-mind distinction raises another important question. If Locke thinks that all material bodies, including therefore our own, are in their inner nature mysterious to us, and that minds are equally mysterious, what is his view of personal identity?
Ayers: The discussion of personal identity is one of the most original and interesting parts of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
He agreed with Descartes that I know that I am a thinking thing, but he held that I don’t know my nature, because I don’t know what nature a thing has to have in order to be able to think. Followers of Descartes held it a very powerful argument for their view that it explained personal identity. For them the identity of a person even in life could not be determined by the body, since matter is in continual flux. So it must be determined by the identity of the soul. The same soul can exist after death – indeed they argued that it followed from the soul’s being immaterial and unextended that it is also by nature indestructible. So at the resurrection personal identity would go along with the same soul. Now Locke started from a different consideration, which is that inimortality has to be personal immortality. The whole point of immortality is, to put it bluntly, reward and punishment. But unless the thing that is being punished in the after-life is conscious of the deeds that it has done in life on earth, then Locke thought that punishment has lost its whole point.
Magee: It would be the equivaient of a different person’s being punished.
Ayers: Right. Suppose that we grant that there is such a thing as an immortal, immaterial soul; suppose we grant that that is what receives punishment. If that soul has no recollection of what happened on earth, immortality loses its point. So what really matters, in Locke’s view, is not the supposed immaterial soul, but consciousness, the unity of consciousness, whatever is its natural basis.
Magee: And the continuity of consciousness.
Ayers: The continuity of consciousness, that is, the individual’s consciousness of its past. And of course in this life what matters is the thought that it’s going to be oneself who is going to get punished in the world to come.
Magee: For Locke, then, memory is the key to personal identity: it is more than anything else the fact that I carry within me a living awareness of my own history that makes me the person I am.
Ayers: Yes. Locke doesn’t deny or doubt that the memory will have some sort of substantial basis. His point is we don’t know what that is. Really the point of his whole argument is to allow for the possibility of immortality without going against his anti-dogmatism, without accepting the immaterial soul of the Cartesians as something of which we have knowledge. But what makes his theory so interesting and important, even today, is that it introduced into modern European thought the idea of the self as constituted by a connected, if interrupted, stream of consciousness. That scandalised the orthodox at the time, but has remained ever since a powerful ingredient of the way we think about ourselves.
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Embora não haja muitos textos clássicos e artigos de autoridade traduzidos para o português online, achei alguns textos que seguem, muitos deles graças a um site dedicado ao tema.
- A Identidade Narrativa de Ricoeur – Francisco Borges
- A Identidade Pessoal e a Inteligência Artificial – dossier
- A Mente e a Identidade Pessoal – dossier
- A teoria de Hume da identidade pessoal – Jaimir Conte
- António Damásio e o Sentimento de Si – dossier
- Aspectos Filosóficos em Blade Runner de Ridley Scott – Carlos Sacramento
- Autopoiesis e identidade pessoal – Francisco Teixeira
- Blackburn e a identidade pessoal – dossier
- Budismo e Identidade Pessoal – Paulo A. E. Borges
- Cristianismo e Identidade Pessoal – Manuel Sumares
- Damásio e o Sentimento de Si – Rita Guerra
- Derek Parfit e a Identidade Pessoal – Sara Coelho
- Ética e identidade pessoal: o impacto das ciências cognitivas – A. Dinis
- Identidade e Identidade Pessoal: Ferret/Ricoeur – dossier
- Identidade Narrativa – Elisabete Joaquim
- Identidade Narrativa e Identidade Pessoal – Paul Ricoeur
- Identidade Pessoal – Carlos João Correia sobre Ricoeur
- Identidade Pessoal: Parfit e Ricoeur – dossier
- Identidade Substancial e Identidade de Consciência em Locke – Laura Teixeira da Silva
- Locke e a identidade pessoal – dossier
- Nagel e a identidade pessoal – dossier
- O Critério Lockiano de Identidade Pessoal – Luís Rodrigues
- Ricoeur e a Identidade Narrativa – William Felippe de Souza
Filed under: Damásio, Hume, Locke, Parfit, Ricoeur, bibliografia, identidade pessoal, narrativa | Leave a Comment
Identidade narrativa
Excerto de “Narrative identity and ipseity by Paul Ricoeur“ de Maria Villela-Petit.
“… Hannah Arendt had already emphasised: ‘Who someone is or was can only said if we know his or her story, that is his or her biography’.
To consider the Who-question in such a way has repercussions for the problem of personal identity. This problem was worked out by Locke, to whom we owe one of the first formulations of the question of self identity. It is true that in order to ’solve’ such a problem, Locke sought to distinguish two sorts of criteria, those relative to the ‘body’, and those relative to ‘mind’. Despite Locke’s intention to overcome Cartesian dualism, this distinction merely confirmed the split between mind and body. Or alternatively, it led to sceptical conclusions, as was the case with Hume.
The notion of ‘a narrative identity’ allows one to think through the question of personal identity in a new way, taking into full account the temporal dimension (the temporality) of a being who, by existing with others in the horizon of a common world, is led to transform him (her)self in the course of a life history, that is, who is what he or she is only in the course of becoming himself or herself. This notion also makes it possible for Ricoeur to distinguish two dimensions within the pseudo-unitarian notion of identity: identity as sameness (Latin: idem); and identity as selfhood (Latin: ipse).
A self understood as the who of a history (story), the one upon whom the story confers a sort of identity, is a self whose temporalisation shapes itself in accordance with a narrative model.”
- Paul Ricoeur, “L’identité narrative”, Esprit 7/8, pp. 299‑304.
- Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre.
- Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit.
Referência online:
- Site dedicado a Paul Ricoeur com uma boa quantidade de links.
Filed under: Arendt, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Ricoeur, identidade pessoal, narrativa | Leave a Comment
MIT Encyclopedia: “self”
O verbete “self” na MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences escrito por Stephen White traz à tona alguns dos problemas envolvendo o “eu”, o primeiro dos quais é o problema da identidade pessoal, que ele introduz sucinta e claramente, embora não mencione diretamente as teorias reducionistas. Eis o primeiro parágrafo do verbete:
Questions about the self are typically posed as questions about persons or minds, about such self-reflexive capacities as self-knowledge and self-reference, or about the semantics and pragmatics of “I.” For example, we think of the self or person as something that endures through changes in its mental states; but what is it that makes us the same person now who we were ten years ago? Among those who reject the idea of a nonphysical substance or soul, the debate has focused on the relative importance of bodily continuity (especially continuity of the brain) and psychological continuity (Williams 1973; Parfit 1984). Because the focus on psychological continuity entails that there could in principle be more than one person in a single human body, the debate has clear implications for controversies in clinical psychology such as that surrounding multiple personality subjects (Hacking 1995). More recently the debate has expanded to include such normative issues as the nature of the justification of the sacrifices that we ordinarily make for our future selves (White 1991; Rovane 1997), raising the question whether personhood is a metaphysical or a normative concept.
- Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 1995.
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons. 1984
- Carol Rovane, The Bounds of Agency, 1997.
- Stephen L. White, The Unity of the Self, 1991.
- Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self. 1973
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Abaixo está uma lista cronológica de alguns dos textos clássicos sobre os temas do eu (self), pessoalidade (personhood) e identidade pessoal. Minha gratidão a Shaun Gallagher por organizar esta lista, à qual fiz algumas emendas.
Platão. 360 a.C. Phaedo, 115 c-d.
“We will certainly try hard to do as you say,” he replied. “But how shall we bury you?”
“However you please,” he replied, “if you can catch me and I do not get away from you.” And he laughed gently, and looking towards us, said: “I cannot persuade Crito, my friends, that the Socrates who is now conversing and arranging the details of his argument is really I; he thinks I am the one whom he will presently see as a corpse, and he asks how to bury me.
Aristóteles. 350 a.C. De Anima, 412a20-b10.
” … the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. … That is why we can wholly dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless as to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one, or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter. Unity has many senses (as many as ‘is’ has), but the most proper and fundamental sense of both is the relation of an actuality to that of which it is the actuality.”
John Locke. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Livro 2, capítulo 27. Of Identity and Diversity, §9.
” … person … a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness with is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it …”
George Berkeley. 1710. Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. Parte 1, §2.
“But, besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them; and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering, about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call MIND, SPIRIT, SOUL, or MYSELF. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived – for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.”
Joseph Butler. 1736. The Analogy of Religion, Apêndice I.
“… one should really think it self-evident, that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity, any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes.”
David Hume. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature. Livro 1, parte 6. Of Personal Identity.
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. … I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
Immanuel Kant. 1781. Critique of Pure Reason, B 157.
“I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose in order to know any object. … In the transcendental synthesis … I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am.”
Thomas Reid. 1785. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Ensaio 3: Of Memory. Caps. 4 e 6.
“The conviction which every man has of his identity …. is indispensably necessary to all exercise of reason.”
Franz Brentano. 1874. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. The Concept and Purpose of Psychology.
“… whether or not there are souls, the fact is that there are mental phenomena. And no one who accepts the theory of the substantiality of the soul will deny that whatever can be established with reference to the soul is also related to mental phenomena. Nothing, therefore, stands in our way if we adopt the modern definition instead of defining psychology as the science of the soul.”
Wilhelm Dilthey. 1883. Introduction to the Human Sciences.
“No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.”
William James. 1890. Principles of Psychology. Cap. 10: The Consciousness of Self.; Cap. 11: The Stream of Consciousness.
“Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, advancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans call it, to that of the pure, Ego.”
Filed under: Aristóteles, Berkeley, Brentano, Butler, Dilthey, Hume, James, Kant, Locke, Platão, Reid, bibliografia, identidade pessoal | 1 Comment
- John Barresi (self, consciência)
- Marvin Belzer (identidade pessoal, ficção)
- David Hershenov (identidade pessoal, ética aplicada)
- Raymond Martin (filosofia britânica do século 18, identidade pessoal)
- Kristie Miller (quadridimensionalismo, identidade pessoal, tempo)
- Eric Olson (identidade pessoal, ontologia)
- Derek Parfit (ética, racionalidade, identidade pessoal)
- John Perry (filosofia da linguagem, filosofia da mente)
- Stuart Rachels (valor, prazer, identidade pessoal)
- David Shoemaker (ética, identidade pessoal)
- Theodore Sider (metaphysics)
- Peter Unger (ontologia, identidade pessoal, ética)
- Caroline West (identidade pessoal, meta-ética)
[Seleção feita a partir do sítio people with online papers in philosophy.]
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Critérios de identidade pessoal
Brian Garrett, no verbete “Personal identity” da Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, apresenta um tratamento preliminar claro acerca dos critérios de identidade pessoal na história da filosofia. Ei-lo:
What is it to be a person? What is it for a person at one time to be identical to some person at a later time? Although the two questions are obviously related, my concern in this entry will be with the second question. However, I assume this much about what it is to be a person: a person is a rational and self-conscious being, with a (more or less) unified mental life. There are indeed cases (multiple personality, split-brain patients, and so on) in which the apparent lack of mental unity casts doubt on whether a single person occupies a given body. But such cases are exceptional. A normal person is a mentally unified individual. The central question of personal identity is the question of what distinguishes the sorts of changes we mentally unified individuals can survive from the sorts of changes which constitute our death.
On one very familiar view (associated with Plato, Descartes and the Christian tradition) a person can survive bodily death. Bodily death is not the sort of change which constitutes personal death. On this view, a person is an immaterial (that is, non-spatial) soul, only contingently attached to a physical body. This view has few philosophical adherents today. It is fraught with metaphysical and epistemological difficulties. (For example: how can an immaterial soul interact with the material world? How can I know that you have a soul?) In what follows I simply assume, without further argument, that our continued existence is not the continued existence of an immaterial soul.
I do not have to deny that in some possible worlds, there are persons who are immaterial souls; but ours is not such a world. And our concern here is with the conditions for the identity over time of actual (human) persons. Once we have given up the immaterialist view of ourselves, we can say the following. A person is a psychophysical entity, which is essentially physically embodied. That is a person (a typical adult human, for example) consists of a biological organism (a human body), with a control centre (the brain) that supports their mental life. Persons are essentially mental, and essentially physically embodied. But this is not the end of puzzles about personal identity; it is just the beginning.
When we judge that a friend before us now is identical to the friend we saw yesterday, we typically make this judgment of personal identity under optimal conditions. In such a case, our friend today is physically continuous with our friend yesterday (they possess the very same brain and body). And our friend today is also psychologically continuous with our friend yesterday (they possess the very same beliefs, character, desires, memories, and so on, with only very slight changes). In this case, our identity judgment is true in virtue of the obtaining of both physical and psychological continuities. The puzzle of personal identity is: which continuity (if any) is the more important or central to our concept of personal identity? Evidently, reflection on the paradigm case just described will not help us to answer that question. We need to consider thought experiments where the continuities come apart.
There are three broad accounts or criteria of personal identity over time: the physical criterion, the psychological criterion, and the mixed criterion. These criteria do not purport just to offer quite general ways of telling or of finding out who is who. They also purport to specify what the identity of persons over time consists in: what it is to be the same person over time. According to the physical criterion, the identity of a person over time consists in the obtaining of some relation of physical continuity (typically either bodily continuity or brain continuity). On this view, to be the same person is to be the same living biological object (whether body or brain).
According to the psychological criterion, the identity of a person over time consists in the obtaining of relations of psychological continuity (overlapping memory chains, or memory together with the retention of other psychological features such as well-entrenched beliefs, character, basic desires, and so on). The psychological criterion splits into a narrow version and a wide version. According to the narrow version, the cause of the psychological continuity must be normal (that is, the continued existence of one’s brain) if it is to preserve personal identity; according to the wide version, any cause will suffice (normal or abnormal). (See Parfit 1984 ch. 10 for more on this distinction.) Sub-versions of the wide and narrow versions differ over the question of whether any one psychological relation is privileged with respect to identity preservation. (For example, John Locke thought that memory was such a privileged relation.)
Each of the physical and psychological criteria divides into many different versions. The distinctive claim of the mixed criterion is that no version of either the physical or psychological criterion is correct. The best account of a person’s identity over time will make reference to both physical and psychological continuities.
Bibliografia citada:
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, cap. 10.
Filed under: Descartes, Locke, Parfit, Platão, identidade pessoal, memória | 1 Comment
Animalismo sobre identidade pessoal é a posição segundo a qual uma pessoa humana é apenas um organismo humano vivo ou um animal humano, em oposição às posições que sustentam que as condições persistentes das pessoas são psicológicas em seu caráter, e não biológicas, e que afirmam que uma pessoa é distinta do seu corpo vivo. Em defesa a tal posição, animalistas levantam a plausibilidade de que nós existimos como um embrião humano, algumas semanas antes de nos tornarmos sujeitos de estados mentais conscientes, e que podemos continuar existindo por um período de tempo após depois que deixarmos de ser um tal sujeito. Contra os animalistas, pode ser observado que se nossos cérebros, intactos e em funcionamento, fossem transplantados para outro animal humano, iríamos adquirir um novo corpo ao invés de outra pessoa (leia-se corpo) receber um novo cérebro. Porém, o animalista pode concordar com isso, afirmando que nesse caso o animal que somos é primeiro reduzido ao tamanho do seu cérebro e então provido com um novo conjunto de partes corporais.
Bibliografia:
- Eric Olson, The Human Animal (Cambridge, 1997).
Referência online:
- Eric Olson, “Personal Identity“, seção 7, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
P.S.: Uma observação interessante que pode trazer luz ao fato de quão pouco o debate contemporâneo sobre identidade pessoal faz parte do contexto filosófico lusófono: a procura por “identidade pessoal” animalismo no Google na data presente retorna 5 resultados, nenhum dos quais é um tratamento minimamete satisfatório do assunto dessa postagem. A mesma procura traduzida para o inglês, i.e. “personal identity” animalism retorna 1060 resultados. Sem querer posso estar até mesmo criando um neologismo técnico.
Filed under: animalismo, bibliografia, identidade pessoal | Leave a Comment
No contexto do debate sobre identidade pessoal, o reducionismo psicológico é a tese, advogada por Derek Parfit, segundo a qual nossa identidade através do tempo deve ser compreendida como uma conexão (connectedness) ou como uma continuidade psicológica com sua causa normal, ou com qualquer outra causa desde que não exista outra pessoa conectada psicologicamente conosco, ou contínua conosco. Parfit chama essa conexão de “Relação R”. A conexão psicológica é realizada, por exemplo, por memórias diretas, pela relação entre intenção e sua eventual implementação na ação, ou pela persistência de crenças ou desejos. A continuidade psicológica, por sua vez, é a retenção de cadeias sobrepostas de conexão forte. Por exemplo, uma pessoa se lembra de suas experiências do dia anterior, tendo naquele dia lembrado de experiências do dia anterior, e assim consecutivamente.
A tese é reducionista por evita a postulação de uma alma cartesiana ou de um eu substancial. Parfit sustenta que a identidade pessoal não é necessariamente determinada. Que uma pessoa mais tarde seja idêntica com uma pessoa mais cedo não precisa ser verdadeiro ou falso; portanto, respostas a questões como “Serei eu quem sofrerá?” ou “Serei eu quem morrerá?” não precisam ser verdadeiras ou falsas.
Como Parfit reconhece, há afinidades interessantes entre esta tese e algumas posições budistas. O Buda ensinou que de certo modo é e de outro modo não é a mesma pessoa que renasce. Locke também é um reducionista psicológico sobre identidade pessoal, já que argumentou em favor da tese de que a mesmidade de uma pessoa através do tempo apenas até onde puder ser estabelecido pela memória, pois ser a mesma pessoa pressupõe a possibilidade de considerar a si mesmo como a mesma pessoa. Apesar de Locke insistir que a alma é redundante para a explicação da identidade pessoal, ele não obstante reivindica que é provável que a alma é aquilo que chamamos “consciência”.
Bibliografia:
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, cap. 27.
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, parte 3.
- Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, cap. 6.
Referência online:
- Gordon Kennedy, “Personal Identity and Psychological Reductionism“.
Filed under: Locke, Parfit, bibliografia, budismo, consciência, identidade pessoal, reducionismo | Leave a Comment
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