display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 3244 | Personal identity cannot be fully known a priori [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: The full conditions of personal identity cannot be extracted from the concept of a person at all: they cannot be arrived at a priori. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (The View from Nowhere [1986], III.2) | |
| A reaction: However, if you turn to experience to get the hang of what a person is, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the essentials from the accidental features of being a person. How essential are memories or reasoning or hopes or understandings or plans? |
| 3245 | The question of whether a future experience will be mine presupposes personal identity [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: The identity of the self must have some sort of objectivity, otherwise the subjective question whether a future experience will be mine or not will be contentless. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (The View from Nowhere [1986], III.3) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit circular and question-begging. If there is no objective self, then the question of whether a future experience will be mine would be a misconceived question. I sympathise with Nagel's attempt to show how personal identity is a priori. |
| 22073 | The basis of philosophy is the Self prior to experience, where it is the essence of freedom [Schelling] |
| Full Idea: The highest principle of all philosophy is the Self insofar as it is purely and simply Self, not yet conditioned by an object, but where it is formulated by freedom. The alpha and omega of all philosophy is freedom. | |
| From: Friedrich Schelling (Letters to Hegel [1795], 1795 02 04), quoted by Jean-François Courtine - Schelling p.83 | |
| A reaction: A common later response to this (e.g. in Schopenhauer) is that there is no concept of the Self prior to experience. The idealists seem to adore free will, while offering no reply to Spinoza on the matter, with whom they were very familiar. |