Verwirrungsfortschritt

I shall discuss what is, for me at least, an extraordinarily difficult and puzzling topic [...] I have discussed this topic on other occasions when, I regret to say, I have been even more confused than I am now. But I find that other philosophers are confused, too. I think I have made some progress. And so I fell justified, therefore, in taking up the topic once again.

Roderick Chisholm leitet so seinen Aufsatz ein über 'Problems of Identity', der 1971 in dem Sammelband Identity and Individuation, hg. von Milton K. Munitz, erschien. Sympathische Einleitung! (Das Problem, das Chisholm meint, ist das der Persistenz: der Identität durch die Zeit.)

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Quelle: Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1775, in "Unpublished Letters of Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1762-1782", ed.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.