1. Describe and assess Derek Parfit's account of personal identity.
Questions and proposals regarding personal identity can be considered as one of oldest and most controversial topics that have been floating in human consciousness. Plethora of philosophers emitted there views regarding what makes one who he is, weather if it is some sort of a substance, also know as soul or weather it is something more liquid that can be easily split or fused. Derek Parfit is a contemporary British philosopher who projected his analyses regarding human identity through reductionist point of view. His main thesis consists of discounting a notion of a third party entity such as soul, and rather putting major emphasis on brain psychology, specifically relations of degree, and the ways that it shapes an “identity” of a person through space and time. Parfit kicks of the essay by using an example involving shattering the bridge between opposing brain hemispheres, a practice that was used in order to treat brain epilepsy. This procedure often times resulted formation of two, co-existing minds inhabiting the same body. To build a more hypothetical and yet easier understandable example Parfit renders a situation in which two opposing parts of brain are transplanted into two different bodies, allegedly resulting formation of identical continues consciousness existing at the same exact time. This farther removes Parfit from the notion of a substance holding