An influential tradition – which in contemporary thinking has its origins in the reflections of John Ellis McTaggart, later followed by many authors in contemporary analytical philosophy – has it that time and change do not exist. According to this same tradition, the idea of personal identity would be inconsistent, and each individual should be regarded as a mere relationship: personal identity would be nothing but the whole of the experiences of each individual, properly related. Against this line of thinking, it can be argued the following: 1) time is a secondary notion with respect to the notions of event, sequence and physical process; 2) change is an ontologically primitive given; to say that a system is changing is nothing but to say that distinctive quantities of that system show ordered and numerically distinct values; 3) among these physical quantities (and the values they assume) a selection may be done, apt to identify those particular systems that we call "persons"; 4) to say that a certain person is changed, means to commit oneself to state the specific features which allow to identify that person, and to show the values which those features have assumed in the same order in which they were recorded.
Giannoli, G.i. (2009). Introduzione. In Tempo e identità (pp. 7-35). Roma : Armando Editore.
Introduzione
GIANNOLI, GIOVANNI IORIO
2009-01-01
Abstract
An influential tradition – which in contemporary thinking has its origins in the reflections of John Ellis McTaggart, later followed by many authors in contemporary analytical philosophy – has it that time and change do not exist. According to this same tradition, the idea of personal identity would be inconsistent, and each individual should be regarded as a mere relationship: personal identity would be nothing but the whole of the experiences of each individual, properly related. Against this line of thinking, it can be argued the following: 1) time is a secondary notion with respect to the notions of event, sequence and physical process; 2) change is an ontologically primitive given; to say that a system is changing is nothing but to say that distinctive quantities of that system show ordered and numerically distinct values; 3) among these physical quantities (and the values they assume) a selection may be done, apt to identify those particular systems that we call "persons"; 4) to say that a certain person is changed, means to commit oneself to state the specific features which allow to identify that person, and to show the values which those features have assumed in the same order in which they were recorded.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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