Tags / 5 quotes from 1 source
#dementia
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Dementia as a real-life thought experiment
Kathleen Wilkes complained that the philosophy of personal identity depends far too much on fanciful thought experiments, and that this is entirely unnecessary, because real life provides all the test cases we need.1 Dementia is perhaps the cruellest and most revealing example…
Dementia as peeling the onion to its core
This is closer to the view taken by Janet and her daughter Jackie, who run the care home where Linda is now a resident. Janet utterly rejects the common view that dementia is the slow death of the self. ‘I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so…
Personality survives failing memory
What gives this view some credence is the extent to which personality remains, even as memory and other cognitive capacities fail. ‘One of the things with the residents here that you see time and time again is that they behave in character,’ says Jackie.
Unified, material constructions
by themselves, these truths leave a lot of unanswered questions and problems. Together, they tell us we are unified, material constructions. Each one of these words is problematic. The degree to which we are unified is still vague. We say we are in some sense constructions, but…
Not identity but what matters
As with the ship of Theseus, the important question is not about identity but about what matters. The same is true when we talk about people in the late stages of dementia. Are they they same persons we knew before the disease took its hold? In some ways yes, in some ways no…