On May 19 (Thursday)\, Alexander Geddes (King's College London) will give a Zoom talk at Tel Aviv University. Interested parties should contact the organizer\, David Kovacs (david.mark.kovacs@gmail.com) for the Zoom link. Below are further details.
Time: 19 May\, 10:15-11:45 (UK) / 12:15-13:45 (Israel) / 19:15-20:45 (Sydney)
Speaker: Alexander Geddes (Research Associate at King's College\, London)
\nTitle: "Personal Identity and the Preservation of Mind"
\nAbstract: The personal identity debate revolves around the apparent tension between the claims that we are animals and that we \;must go where our minds go. These are taken to be in tension on the basis that there are possible \;separation \;cases: cases in which \;a human animal and a human mind part ways. The tension therefore depends both on assumptions about the persistence \;conditions of human animals and on assumptions about the preservation of mind. In the present paper\, I focus on the latter. \; I show \;that a mind should be taken to go somewhere in a would-be separation case only granted a certain sort of account of the preservation of \;reference-involving mental properties. I argue that this sort of account is without support\, and motivate an alternative\, according to which \;identity of subject is a requirement on the preservation of all such properties. Accepting this requirement is shown to involve no incoherence or \;implausibility\, and to have considerable intuitive and explanatory appeal. Finally\, I argue that this not only allows us to resolve the tension above in a novel way\, it also suggests that\, in order to arrive at a principled verdict about the mental facts in would-be separation \;cases\, we may have to \;bring to bear \;an account of our nature&mdash\;precluding any attempt to develop an account of our nature on the basis of such cases.
ORGANIZER;CN=David Mark Kovacs: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR