Exam 5: Self

Discuss the existential notion "you are your life, and nothing else." If we, rather than our circumstances, define ourselves and are ultimately responsible for creating the life we live, then to whom can we complain if life isn't exactly the way we'd like it to be? Is it possible to die too soon? If your ambition was to be a doctor, and you put yourself through the requisite schooling but die before the end of your internship, do you think that your life was "summed up" and complete? Do you agree with the existentialist that you are the total of all you have done and hoped to be?

__________ was Sartre's characterization of a person's refusal to accept him or herself.

The philosophical problem of self-identity is concerned in part with what the characterizing qualities are of an identity.

What did Sartre call a person's "projections into the future," that is, his or her ambitions, plans, intentions, hopes, and fantasies?

__________ believed that we could not rely on spatiotemporal continuity to account for the self.

The self, for Kant, was also the activity of applying the rules by which we organize our experience.

__________ is Sartre's term (borrowed from Heidegger) for the totality of facts that is true of a person at any given time.

__________ argued that self-identity, in every case, was a matter of choice.

Jean-Paul Sartre was unique among the existentialists in thinking that existence came before essence.

Kant objected to __________ on three grounds. (1) Our concern with self-consciousness is given impetus because we are not often self-conscious. (2) Kant did not believe that the thinking self was a thinking thing because the self was not in our experience but rather responsible for it. The self is an activity, which undermines the traditional concept of the soul. Finally, (3) Kant believed that we needed two very different conceptions of self.

__________ argues that spatiotemporal continuity is essential to being a particular person.

Some feminists claim that the only way that society can repair itself and allow people to have individual identities is to establish a society without __________.

In her memoir Crossing, American economist __________ describes the kind of transformation she experienced in the process of having her gender reassigned.

Meredith Michaels presents several cases discussing __________ theory.

By transcendental Kant meant what was a sufficient condition for the possibility of particular experiences.

Hume concluded that the idea of a self was simply a fiction.

A problem that has most concerned philosophers about identity, is how to identify an individual as the same individual when they change location.

In __________ a truer perspective recognizes the non-existence of the self, though existence of the non-self is an ideal understanding, which can be fully achieved only with enlightenment.

In trying to distinguish genuine memories from apparent memories, we must discover if the person having the memories is the same person as the one who had the experience. To do that, we have to presuppose the existence of a persistent self-identical person. But we cannot use the concept of memory to explain self-identity and then use the concept of self-identity to explain memory because then Memory Theory would be circular. Is there any way to use memory as a criterion of personal identity without getting into the circularity trap?

_____________ idea that memory was what constituted a self-identity was inspired by the Cartesian notion that a person's relationship to her own thoughts is unique. You cannot think my thoughts, and I cannot think yours.