On Second Thought, Let’s Take the Stairs or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Teletransporter

Abstract

This thesis explored the issues surrounding Personal Identity as argued in Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Beginning with Parfit’s Reductionism and his arguments on the unimportance of Identity, I sought to determine the importance of identity in survival and whether Parfit’s Relation R accurately reflected the important things in survival. I argued that Parfit’s rejection of the self failed to reflect what we hold to be intuitively important, and that an intermediate Reductionist View that still valued identity was more attractive.