- Parfit
- Derek Parfit was a highly influential British philosopher known for revolutionizing how we think about personal identity, morality, and what makes life worth living. He argued that our sense of being a continuous, unified "self" is partly an illusion, and that what really matters is the continuation of our thoughts and experiences, not some invisible thread connecting us through time. His ideas have shaped modern ethics and how philosophers approach questions about identity, responsibility, and how we should treat future generations.
- Reductionism(The second dogma identified in Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1953, 20))
- The belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.
- Unified apperceiving subject(what Parfit argues we don't actually need to posit exists)
- A single, unchanging 'self' or 'consciousness' that stands apart from your thoughts and experiences—the idea that there's a special inner 'you' that observes everything you think and do.
- personal identity(Philosophy of personal identity)
- The relation of sameness holding between a person existing at one time and something existing at another time, analyzed here in terms of psychological continuity
- psychological continuity(Philosophy of personal identity)
- A relation holding between a person at one time and a being at a later time when the later being inherits the memories, intentions, beliefs, and psychological states of the earlier person.