Reply to Mamabeek
Wow! I haven't even thought about this blog in ages, and it's nice to see that it actually meant something to some people enough to actually leave me a few comments. I cannot help but be flattered, even if I do not agree with some of what has been said. Mamabeek left me an interesting comment to my Introduction post. I will not here repeat it, since you can visit the links if you're curious. I am familiar with the argument adumbrated by Mamabeek in her comment. I do not, of course, agree with it, but it does deserve some sort of reply. I can think of no better reply than the one of which I thought years ago now, when I read some of the article on Personal Identity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . In this article, Eric T. Olsen draws a distinction between qualitative and numeric al identity. Think of a person as consisting of various person-stages existing over time. Numerical identity occurs when those person-stages belong to one and the same person. Qual