Book | Chapter
The identity of persons
pp. 283-335
Abstract
The final step of Collingwood's case for the "re-enactment" thesis involved denying that minds are particulars, like typewriters, which, because they are not numerically identical, cannot perform numerically identical acts of thought. Rather, he insisted, minds are just complexes of activities, so that it would be begging the question to invoke the distinctness of the minds as a reason for denying the possibility of those minds overlapping to the extent that they consisted of qualitatively identical acts of thought i.e. judgements whose propositional force and content were the same. While Collingwood himself offered insufficient justification for these claims we have now seen how they can be legitimated by conjoining our argument for the non-phenomenal status of rationalized mental acts with a defence of Schopenhauer's principium individuationis. Non-phenomenal acts can be individuated neither by reference to their performance by spatio-temporal bodies nor by supposedly purely temporal Cartesian souls; and the suggestion that there might be particular act-individuating mind-substances that were neither spatially not temporally individuated itself falls foul of a plausible PI.
Publication details
Published in:
Walker Mark Thomas (2012) Kant, Schopenhauer and morality: recovering the categorical imperative. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pages: 283-335
Full citation:
Walker Mark Thomas (2012) The identity of persons, In: Kant, Schopenhauer and morality, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 283–335.