The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 154 of 254
The false precision of personal identity theory
The philosophy of personal identity is, unfortunately, a prime example of this. It is fatally flawed by its goal of stating the strict logical conditions for the persistence of a person over time. Because this is how the whole debate is framed, it tends to underestimate the reality and significance of the vagueness inherent both in the concepts surrounding persons and in persons themselves. The theories thus say more about the logic of the concepts they employ than the phenomena they describe. And because many of the most important aspects of being a person do not yield…