Thomas Reid und die Identität

Fundstück: Das Gedankenexperiment vom konzeptuellen Zusammenhang von Körper und Geist in der Frage der Identität. Bis dato waren mir nur die Varianten von Bernard Williams und Sidney Shoemaker bekannt: rund 200 Jahre später!

In 1775 Thomas Reid, a leading light of Scottish philosophy, wrote to the distinguished judge Lord Kames: "I would be glad to know your Lordship's opinion whether when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after the same materials are fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being, whether, I say, that being will be me; or, if, two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain; whether they will all be me, and consequently one and the same intelligent being".

Quelle: Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1775, in "Unpublished Letters of Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1762-1782", ed. Ian S. Ross, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 7 (1965), 17-65.
Quelle hier: Nicholas Humphrey: Seeing red : a study in consciousness. - Cambridge /MA : Belknap Press, 2006, S. 1.