Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction (excerpted)

1. The bad news is that all of these essays were in their completed form five or six years before the book was published; as a result, the arguments sometimes seem a little bit familiar and, of course, neither profit from nor engage the most recent literature on the topics they address.
2. The good news is that "Dancy (Jonathan), Ed. - Reading Parfit" includes some very fine essays (and, in my opinion, a few not-very-fine essays) by talented philosophers. These essays, taken together, address all four parts of Reasons and Persons: Self Defeating Theories, Rationality and Time, Personal Identity, and Future Generations. I'll focus my discussion on (the parts of) those essays-about half of the essays in the collection-that say something about Parfit¹'s metaphysics of personal identity.
3. What is Parfit²'s metaphysics of personal identity? It involves, in large part, the relation of psychological connectedness and continuity.