Personal Identity
Noonan (Harold)
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Amazon Product Description

  1. Personal Identity is a comprehensive introduction to the nature of the self and its relation to the body. Harold Noonan places the problem of personal identity in the context of more general puzzles about identity, discussing the major historical theories and more recent debates.
  2. The second edition of Personal Identity contains a new chapter on 'animalism1' and a new section on vagueness.
Book Comment
  • Routledge; 2 edition (30 Oct 2003),
  • My copy badly adulterated by my own marginal annotations.


"Lowe (E.J.) - Review of Noonan's 'Personal Identity'"

Source: Mind 99.395, July 1990, pp. 477-479


Substantial Excerpts
  • This book appears in a series called 'The Problems of Philosophy: Their Past and Present', and as such is designed to be useful to undergraduate students of philosophy as well as to make an original contribution to its topic. In both respects the book is a notable success, though undergraduates may find the later, non-historical chapters hard going. These difficulties, however, are unavoidable if the issues are to have justice done to them.
  • After a useful introductory overview of the terrain to be traversed, Noonan has three excellent historical chapters on Locke, on Leibniz, Butler and Reid, and on Hume: these chapters are clear, probing, and offer some refreshingly original insights in an area which is all too often littered with stereotypes. Locke, in particular, is often made by Noonan to appear in a new light. I confess, though, that I cannot agree with everything that Noonan has to say about Locke's position – which is unsurprising given the difficulty of the text. Most importantly, while Noonan in general treats Locke with respect and much sympathy, I think he makes Locke's position look more vulnerable than it might really be by over-emphasising the role that Locke sometimes accords to 'thinking substances' (which Locke normally takes to be immaterial spirits or souls) in his account of personal identity.
  • ...
  • I turn now to the non-historical part of Noonan's book, which provides well-informed and sophisticated discussion of the opinions of such modern authors as Williams, Shoemaker, Parfit, and Nozick. With so much ground to cover, it is perhaps unsurprising – if a trifle disappointing – that little or nothing is said of certain currently less fashionable views of personal identity of a neo-Kantian or neo-Aristotelian stripe, such as those of Strawson and Wiggins respectively. And, while Noonan helpfully draws an important distinction between 'Simple1' and 'Complex' views of personal identity, it is rival versions of the 'Complex' view that get the limelight: the 'Simple' view (according to which there is no informative criterion of personal identity, and of which Swinburne and Chisholm are taken as the major modern representatives) is for the most part depicted as forbidden fruit which must be avoided even at considerable cost to our pre-theoretical intuitions. Indeed, Noonan himself is prepared to pay what seems to me a quite extravagant price in counter-intuitive consequences for his own preferred account of personal identity – an account which makes psychological continuity criterial while rejecting the 'best candidate' approach favoured by authors like Parfit and Nozick. (The major theorist closest to Noonan, it seems, is David Lewis.) Perhaps the most remarkable consequence of Noonan's theory – one which, in my opinion, constitutes its reductio ad absurdum2 – is what he calls the 'Multiple Occupancy Thesis' (p. 18), according to which prior to a case of personal fission (as in fictional cases of brain-bisection and transplantation) both of the later persons already exist but exactly coincide spatially, to the extent indeed that, in David Lewis's words, they comprise at that time 'two minds with but a single thought'.
  • But reflection on the identity-conditions of thoughts (which more consideration of Strawson's views might have prompted) should, I suggest, teach us that thoughts are logically non-shareable between persons, and hence that Lewis's description is simply incoherent. Of course, Noonan may respond to this that in reality thoughts are only logically non-shareable between person-stages, and that the persons who coincide prior to fission have prior to that time exactly the same person-stages. But the whole business of 'person-stages' I find deeply suspicious, and indeed one particularly unsatisfactory feature of Noonan's book, for me, is its failure to address at all seriously the objections of philosophers like Geach and Mellor to the very notion that continuants have temporal parts or stages.
  • One other criticism of a very general nature that I have concerns methodology. Noonan follows the modern fashion in making extensive use of science-fictional thought-experiments3 to test rival accounts of personal identity, but nowhere does he give a sustained justification of this procedure in the light of the growing objections to it raised by such recent authors as Kathleen Wilkes and Mark Johnston. (Noonan does in fact refer to Johnston's views on p. 212, but does not tackle them directly.)
  • Despite my reservations, I do not want to convey the impression that I found this book anything less than both very rewarding and challenging – though, ironically, the message that it conveys for me is not the one that Noonan intends it to convey, but rather that, considering the many counter-intuitive consequences of all existing versions of the 'Complex' view, the 'Simple' view4 has after all a lot to be said for it.

Paper Comment



In-Page Footnotes ("Lowe (E.J.) - Review of Noonan's 'Personal Identity'")

Footnote 2:


"Noonan (Harold) - An Initial Survey"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 1


Contents
  1. Introduction – 1
  2. Constitutive and evidential criteria – 2
  3. The bodily criterion – 2
  4. The brain criterion1 – 3
  5. The physical criterion – 4
  6. Objections to the physical criterion – 6
  7. The memory criterion – 9
  8. The psychological continuity2 criterion – 10
  9. The circularity objection – 11
  10. The reduplication3 argument – 12
  11. The revised psychological continuity4 criterion – 13
  12. The multiple occupancy thesis – 14
  13. The simple view5 – 15
  14. The determinacy thesis – 17
  15. What matters6 in survival – 19
  16. Parfit7's argument – 21


"Noonan (Harold) - Locke"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 2


Contents
  1. Introduction – 24
  2. The principium individuationis1 – 27
  3. Substantial identity – 28
  4. Plants2, animals and men – 31
  5. Personal identity and consciousness – 33
  6. 'Person': a forensic3 term – 39
  7. Consciousness – 43
  8. A much debated passage – 44

Paper Comment

Photocopy filed in "Various - Papers on Identity Boxes: Vol 12 (N-O)".


"Noonan (Harold) - Leibniz, Butler and Reid"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 3


Contents
  1. Introduction – 47
  2. Discourse on metaphysics – 47
  3. The New Essays – 49
  4. Butler and Reid – 53
  5. The circularity objection – 56
  6. The Butler-Reid-Shoemaker objection – 58
  7. Conclusion – 63


"Noonan (Harold) - Hume"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 4


Contents
  1. Introduction – 64
  2. Our idea of identity – 67
  3. The reification of perceptions – 68
  4. Of soul and self – 73
  5. The source of the mistake – 76
  6. Objections to Hume – 80
  7. Conclusion – 85


"Noonan (Harold) - Identity and Personal Identity"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 5


Contents
  1. Introduction – 86
  2. A puzzle – 87
  3. A solution – 88
  4. An alternative solution – 93
  5. The simple and complex views – 95
  6. Reductionism1 and non-reductionism – 97
  7. Persons as endurers2 or persons as perdurers3? – 100
  8. Conclusion – 104


"Noonan (Harold) - Identity and Determinacy"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 6


Contents
  1. Introduction – 105
  2. The Determinacy Thesis – 105
  3. Types of indeterminacy – 107
  4. Indeterminacy as semantic indecision – 108
  5. The Epistemic View – 109
  6. Indeterminacy and identity over time – 110
  7. Fuzzy objects – 112
  8. Indeterminacy and brain transplants1 – 118
  9. Indeterminacy and Methuselah2 – 119
  10. The determinacy thesis and personal perdurance3 – 120
  11. Objections to personal perdurance4 – 121
  12. Inconstancy in modal5 predication – 124
  13. Conclusion – 126


"Noonan (Harold) - The Reduplication Problem"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 7


Contents
  1. Introduction: The generality of the argument – 127
  2. The Only x and y1 principle – 129
  3. The ship of Theseus2 – 131
  4. Wiggins's argument – 133
  5. An alternative argument – 135
  6. Further objections – 136
  7. A counter-argument countered – 137
  8. Cambridge change3 – 138
  9. The Only x and y4 principle reformulated – 139
  10. The multiple occupancy thesis – 139
  11. Conclusion – 142


"Noonan (Harold) - Quasi-Memory"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 8


Contents
  1. Introduction – 144
  2. The circularity objection – 145
  3. Quasi-memory1 – 147
  4. Quasi-memory2 and privileged access – 150
  5. The content of quasi-memory3 – 153
  6. M-connectedness4 and personal identity – 157


"Noonan (Harold) - Parfit and What Matters in Survival"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 9


Contents
  1. Introduction – 163
  2. Identity and survival – 163
  3. What does matter – 164
  4. Fission and survival – 165
  5. Assessment of the argument – 166
  6. Anti-Parfit1 – 168
  7. The Only x and y2 principle revisited – 171
  8. Parfitian3 survival and trivial facts – 172


"Noonan (Harold) - The Self and the Future"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 10


Contents
  1. Introduction – 178
  2. Two puzzle cases – 179
  3. Body-switching? – 181
  4. Mind-swapping? – 185
  5. Identity and determinacy – 190
  6. Conclusion – 195


"Noonan (Harold) - Persons, Animals and Human Beings"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 11


Contents
  1. Introduction – 196
  2. The Transplant Intuition1 – 199
  3. Rejection of the Transplant Intuition2 – 201
  4. The Hybrid Approach3 – 205
  5. The Too Many Minds4 Objection – 209
  6. Conclusion – 213

Paper Comment

See "Noonan (Harold) - Persons, Animals and Human Beings (2010)" for an updated account.


"Noonan (Harold) - Persons, Animals and Human Beings (2010)"

Source: Campbell, O'Rourke & Silverstein - Time and Identity, 2005-10, III - The Self, Chapter 9


Abstract1
  1. Harold Noonan leans on an intriguing view of first-person reference to further articulate his approach to personal identity and personhood.
  2. We might ask very generally, "What changes can a person survive? What changes will terminate a person's existence?" Noonan argues that the indexical formulation of the problem is more basic: "Our interest in personal identity is fundamentally an interest in our own identity." On this view, persons are just the objects of first-person reference.
  3. Armed with this simple conception of persons, Noonan suggests that defenders of the psychological approach to personal identity can rebut Olson's "too many minds2 objection," also known as the "thinking animal3" problem.
  4. Perhaps we should admit that each of us "is" an animal "in the sense of coinciding with one and being constituted of the same matter as one — but this 'is' is the 'is' of constitution, not identity" (195).
  5. But even if persons and human animals4 coincide in this manner and both think "'I'-thoughts," it does not follow that their thoughts are about different thinkers.
  6. Noonan thus dissolves the skeptical difficulties associated with the too many minds5 objection — "Both the person and the animal can know that their utterance of 'I am a person' is true" (198) — for 'I'-thoughts always refer to the person thinking them. His essay concludes with an extended defense of this approach from "Olson (Eric) - Thinking Animals and the Reference of 'I'" (2002) objections.

Paper Comment

This is an update of "Noonan (Harold) - Persons, Animals and Human Beings", Chapter 11 of "Noonan (Harold) - Personal Identity".



In-Page Footnotes ("Noonan (Harold) - Persons, Animals and Human Beings (2010)")

Footnote 1: Taken from p. 16 of "Slater (Matthew H.) - Framing the Problems of Time and Identity", footnotes removed (for now).


"Noonan (Harold) - Against the Closest Continuer Theory"

Source: Noonan - Personal Identity, 2003, Chapter 12


Contents
  1. Introduction – 214
  2. The Only x and y1 principle revisited – 215
  3. The Vienna Circle – 220
  4. The self and the future – 221
  5. Fission – 225


Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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