Personal Identity And Immortality Summary

Perry’s “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” is based on an enthusiastic conversation between a philosophy teacher, Gretchen Weirob, a student of hers, Dave Cohen, and a long time friend Sam Miller. Using this reading I will argue against Weirob’s claim that personal identity cannot consist in the sameness of an immaterial, unobservable soul. Weirob makes it known that she does not believe the existence of souls is relevant to personal identity (page 17). She believes that personal identity is directly related to bodily identity because you can’t see or touch or smell someone’s soul, but you can see, touch and smell someone’s physical body (page 11). Weirob is able to support this argument successfully through the use of analogies …show more content…
So if she was to die then there’s no way she’d come back in the after life as the same exact person because her original body is no longer in existence, meaning that the person who resembles her in the afterlife is a different body and therefore a different person (page 9). Another analogy she used was the chocolate swirl analogy. In this she reasons that in order to know what’s inside the chocolate based on its outer features is through the experience of eating it yourself or seeing what happens when someone else eats it. We are not able to observe souls in this way so the argument of same body, same soul is not supported (page 11). The last analogy I will use to show that Weirob claims that personal identity does not consist in the sameness of soul is the Blue River analogy. In this argument she explains that we can recognize a river at different points by its physical features and the similarities in water quality. But new water molecules will always replace the content of the river, which leads her to conclude that you do not need to recognize the specific content of …show more content…
In doing this, I will be using the story of Julia North and Mary Frances. This story states that Julia was hit by a train saving Mary’s child, which caused Mary to have a stroke. Afterwards, a doctor notices that Julia’s brain is still intact while Mary’s was not. So, he replaced Mary’s brain with Julia’s but the person who woke up claimed to be Julia. Earlier, on page 30, Cohen makes the conclusion that in order to decipher who holds the real memories of a person, they had to have obtained their memories the right way, which would be through earlier experiences. With Cohen’s conclusion we can say that the person who came out of the surgery would be Julia because those are the memories that stuck with the person that came out of surgery. Which is something that Miller also defined on page 26 stating what it means to be that person1. This also goes back to Weirob’s claim in her chocolate swirl analogy, where Miller opposes Weirob’s claim by saying we can observe someone’s soul by observing their psychological characteristics such as their attitude, beliefs and prejudices. Using this information we can say that personal identity does consist with soul identity because the brain of Julia was placed into the body of Mary but the person who came out held all the

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Personal Identity And Immortality Summary

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