Real People Personal Identity without Thought Experiments [Paperback]

This book explores the scope and limits of the concept of a person. Questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation, Wilkes argues that such experimentation engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results, and that truth is anyway stranger than fiction. She then examines an assortment of real-life conditions, including fantasy, insanity and dementia, dissociated states, and split brains; questions the idea that people have some special kind of unity and continuity of consciousness; and looks at the views of the person as found in Homer, Aristotle, the post-Cartesians, and contemporary cognitive science.

Wilkes has been foremost among British philosophers in trying to reconceptualize the philosophy of mind in light of research in psychology and physiology....The book is engagingly written and Wilkes is very well informed in a host of historic and recent topics....Enthusiastically recommended for advanced students. --Choice