Schechtman's Criticism of Parfit

Paper Summary:

This paper summarizes the ideas of Derek Parfit in the field of personal identity and then expresses the criticisms of Derek Parfit by Marta Schechtam that she includes in her well-known book, "The Constitution of Selves".

From the Paper:

"Parfit describes the reductionist view of the personal identity theory as, "the truth about people must consist in the truth of facts about bodies, and about various interrelated mental and physical events such as thoughts, memory, experiences" (Chalmers, 658) Thus, according to a reductionist, persons are nothing over and above the existence of certain mental and/or physical states and their various relations. Parfit illustrates his reductionist view of persons with the famous "club" example: Just as we are not apt to think that a social club has any ontological status over and above the existence of its members and their relation to one another, so too Parfit claims that we should not take persons to exist apart from the various physical and psychological events that characterize them. (Schechtman, 37) Given this, Parfit believes that facts about personal identity just consist in more particular facts concerning psychological continuity and/or connectedness, and thus personal identity can be reduced to this continuity and/or connectedness. As noted earlier, for Parfit, what it means to be a reductionist about persons is to hold that persons are constructs of appropriately related person time-stages. All that is required for a person at time t2 to be the same person as a person at t1 on a reductionist psychological continuity theory, then, is for person at t2 to be psychologically continuous with the person at time t1. This is what Parfit terms the Psychological Criterion for personal identity."

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