A dialogue on identity and immortality (summary)A dialogue on identity and immortality (summary).doc

? Perry On Personal Identity What follows is a (long-ish!) summary of:?Perrys?A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality 1. First Night ????The Challenge Weirob challenges her friend Miller to comfort her on her death bed by showing that there is, at the very least, the mere?possibility?of her surviving after her death. The next three nights, then, are spent arguing whether such a thing is possible. ????Numerical Identity vs. Qualitative Identity Weirob is first careful to make the distinction between?numerical identity?and?qualitative identity?(in the dialogue, Perry calls the former identity and the latter exact similarity). Numerical identity is the relation that each thing holds to itself--e.g., I am numerically identical to myself, you are numerically identical to yourself, Jon Stewart is identical to himself, etc. Qualitative identity, on the other hand, is the relation that many things can have to many others, provided that they have the same properties in common. For example, in recitation I talked about how two pieces of chalk could all have the same properties--e.g., they could both be white, cylindrical, so many inches long, kept in a cardboard box, etc.--yet since they are?two?pieces of chalk they are not?numerically?identical. Rather, they merely share properties, but are not one and the same piece of chalk. ????The Soul View Millers first stab at proving that survival after death is possible involves claiming that people are identical to souls, not bodies. If this is right [so the argument would go] then survival after death is possible because even though your body dies,?you--your soul--lives on. Weirob challenges this in the following way: the soul is defined as something immaterial--something that cannot be seen or felt or touched or smelt, etc. Yet all we have access to are?material?bodies--things that can be seen or felt or touched or smelt, etc. Souls?in principle?cannot be seen or sensed in any way; that is, by their very nature they are