Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness by Brian Garrett

Routledge (International Library of Philosophy)

0 415 16573 3

ix + 137pp

David Mackie

What does it take for you to persist from one day to the next? In Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness, Brian Garrett provides a very readable overview of the central positions in the debate about the metaphysics of personal identity, and of many of the arguments most frequently discussed, including, as well as the usual topics, two chapters on the semantics and epistemology of first-person judgements.

The writing is clear and accessible, and the book will be of use to students. The professionals at whom it is officially pitched, however, will find the argument of the central chapters disappointingly brisk and one-sided. Rival views are typically dismissed, and Garrett’s own view is endorsed, on the basis of a couple of unexamined intuitions about imagined cases. Derek Parfit’s immensely complex arguments about the importance of personal identity are unsatisfyingly dismissed in just six pages. Defenders of ‘animalism’—the trivial-sounding view that we are human beings—are saddled with an implausible version of their view that is little better than a straw man. Obvious objections and replies are repeatedly overlooked. In an area of philosophy in which every position has at least some counterintuitive implications, this kind of treatment will not do.

The details of Garrett’s own view are left unclear. In rejecting animalism, Garrett claims, for example, that the human being in my chair shares all my intrinsic properties, but unlike me is not self-conscious. Amazingly, he does not seem to think that the obvious question how this is possible needs any answer. Indeed, the implausible implications of Garrett’s own view, which are not explored in the book, comfortably outweigh those of most of its rivals. Garrett thinks (incredibly, to my mind) that though we are made entirely of matter, we are not material objects. It is only thus that he can hope to maintain that he could survive with a new, ‘bionic’, brain and body, different from the brain and body he currently has, while avoiding the logical incoherence of claiming that one material object can turn into another. But what kind of things are we, if not material objects? Despite the promise on page two, Garrett nowhere gives a clear answer—perhaps because the answer threatens to be an embarrassment.