The concept of human identity or who we really are has perplexed thinkers in all ages. Currently psychologists have shunned discussing this topic since it is an area that is incapable of being objectified or accurately defined. Yet the lack of self-knowledge is the problem of all problems. Due to such a lack we, for the most part, lead lives fraught with illusions, superficialities, and economic woes. This book is about how we can know our real selves or our genuine identity. It is the author's considered belief that we are all far greater than what we think we are, and the more we know about ourselves, the better we will be able, not only to make the most of life, but also to solve effectively social, economic, and political problems related to such areas as crime, poverty, competition, capitalism, individualism, freedom, and democracy, as well as war and peace. The viewpoint presented in this book is that, without a thorough understanding of who we are, no meaningful social reform can ever materialize. The author, a psychologist and teacher, breaks new ground in the field of understanding human identity and human problems. The guidance offered should be of capital interest to those who seek in life something deeper than the mere surface, something more than what is promoted by the zeitgeist of recent centuries and materialistic culture. The book is a valuable resource to readers aiming to enhance their capacity to know themselves and find their path in life.

Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.

The relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us to the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? Personal Identity and Ethics provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity’s significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.

A team of leading experts investigate a range of philosophical issues to do with the self and self-knowledge. Self and Self-Knowledge focuses on two main problems: how to account for I-thoughts and the consequences that doing so would have for our notion of the self; and how to explain subjects' ability to know the kind of psychological states they enjoy, which characteristically issues in psychological self-ascriptions. The first section of the volume consists of essays that, by appealing to different considerations which range from the normative to the phenomenological, offer an assessment of the animalist conception of the self. The second section presents an examination as well as a defence of the new epistemic paradigm, largely associated with recent work by Christopher Peacocke, according to which knowledge of our own mental states and actions should be based on an awareness of them and of our attempts to bring them about. The last section explores a range of different perspectives—from neo-expressivism to constitutivism—in order to assess the view that self-knowledge is more robust than any other form of knowledge. While the contributors differ in their specific philosophical positions, they all share the view that careful philosophical analysis is needed before scientific research can be fruitfully brought to bear on the issues at hand. These thought-provoking essays provide such an analysis and greatly deepen our understanding of these central aspects of our mentality.

As witnessed by recent films such as Fight Club and Identity, our culture is obsessed with multiple personality—a phenomenon raising intriguing questions about personal identity. This study offers both a full-fledged philosophical theory of personal identity and a systematic account of multiple personality. Gunnarsson combines the methods of analytic philosophy with close hermeneutic and phenomenological readings of cases from different fields, focusing on psychiatric and psychological treatises, self-help books, biographies, and fiction. He develops an original account of personal identity (the authorial correlate theory) and offers a provocative interpretation of multiple personality: in brief, "multiples" are right about the metaphysics but wrong about the facts.

'Soul', 'self', ‘substance’ and 'person' are just four of the terms often used to refer to the human individual. Cutting across metaphysics, ethics, and religion the nature of personal identity is a fundamental and long-standing puzzle in philosophy. Personal Identity and Applied Ethics introduces and examines different conceptions of the self, our nature, and personal identity and considers the implications of these for applied ethics. A key feature of the book is that it discusses a range of different approaches to personal identity; philosophical, religious and cross-cultural, including perspectives from non-Western traditions. Within this comparative framework, Andrea Sauchelli examines the following topics: Early views of the soul in Plato, Christianity and Descartes The Buddhist 'no-self' views and the self as a fiction Confucian ideas of our nature and the importance of self-cultivation as constitutive of the self Locke's theory of personal identity as continuity of consciousness and memory and objections by Butler and Reid as well as contemporary critics The theory of 'animalism' and arguments concerning embodied theories of personal identity Practical and narrative theories of personal identity and moral agency Personal identity and issues in applied ethics, including abortion, organ transplantation, and the idea of life after death Implications of life-extending technologies for personal identity. Throughout the book Sauchelli also considers the views of important recent philosophers such as Sydney Shoemaker, Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Christine Korsgaard, placing these in helpful historical context. Chapter summaries, a glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading make this a refreshing, approachable introduction to personal identity and applied ethics. It is an ideal text for courses on personal identity that consider both western and non-western approaches and that apply theories of personal identity to ethical problems. It will also be of interest to those in related subjects such as religious studies and history of ideas.

When philosophers address personal identity, they usually explore numerical identity: what are the criteria for a person's continuing existence? When non-philosophers address personal identity, they often have in mind narrative identity: Which characteristics of a particular person are salient to her self-conception? This book develops accounts of both senses of identity, arguing that both are normatively important, and is unique in its exploration of a range of issues in bioethics through the lens of identity. Defending a biological view of our numerical identity and a framework for understanding narrative identity, DeGrazia investigates various issues for which considerations of identity prove critical: the definition of death; the authority of advance directives in cases of severe dementia; the use of enhancement technologies; prenatal genetic interventions; and certain types of reproductive choices. He demonstrates the power of personal identity theory to illuminate issues in bioethics as they bring philosophical theory to life.