1992/03/01 by Arindam Chakrabarti
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Classical Philosophy and Thought #Medieval and Classical Philosophy
paper · doi:10.2307/2107746
Realisms about the self and about the external world entail each other. And both realisms derive support from the plain fact of perceptual reidentification of objects across times and senses. That is going to be the major contention of this paper. The Berkeleyan view that there is an abiding ego undergoing subjective states but no material objects for these states to focus on will be shown to be inconsistent. Equally incoherent, I shall argue, is the Parfitian view that there are more or less persistent material objects, e.g., buildings in Venice and hemispheres of brains, and also experiences and thoughts about them but no stable owners of those states of consciousness. A reductive anti-realism about selves will logically commit us to a similar diffusion of material bodies into their secondary qualities, and of those, in turn, to subjective