Clássicos sobre identidade pessoal

24Ago07

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