ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two arguments presented by Terence Penelhum in his Survival and Disembodied Existence against the possibility of disembodied survival. Penelhum’s first argument is that the memory criterion of personal identity is parasitic upon bodily identity. Penelhum’s second argument is the more fundamental contention that the notion of a disembodied person is unintelligible. This chapter attempts to develop a theory of survival and re-embodied existence by first developing the concept of a minimal person, an individual that no longer possesses a body but remembers things about their past, including their embodied past, has thoughts about what they remember, is able to indulge in reasoning and has dream-like perceptions. The chapter uses this concept to argue against Penelhum that there is nothing incoherent in the idea of such a minimal person’s surviving death and later becoming fully personal again by the adoption of a body. After arguing that Penelhum’s arguments against the identity of incorporeal persons are not convincing, the chapter proceeds to argue that the evidence of memory might provide good grounds for a disembodied individual to conclude themselves to be identical with some previously embodied individual. It is not argued that personal identity should be defined in terms of memory; in fact, it is argued that it cannot be right to define personal identity in terms of memory. Rather, the position defended against Penelhum is that memory is logically sufficient for minimal personal identity and that it is possible that memory is epistemically necessary and sufficient for a minimal person to conclude that they are the same individual that had some particular experience or performed some particular action in the past. Penelhum presents two main arguments against the view that memory is epistemically sufficient for personal identity. The first is that memory is fallible, and so memory claims might always be mistaken. The second is that a minimal personal memory claim could not be checked and so could not be evidence for anything. In response to this it is conceded, firstly, that memory claims are indeed fallible but that this would be a problem only if it were being asserted that personal identity were constituted by memory, and, secondly, the physical checks stressed by Penelhum may fail to put the one checking in any better an epistemic position than would checks that rely only on the recollections of memory. The chapter concludes by analysing Penelhum’s comments on the resurrection, and by arguing, against Penelhum’s scepticism, that minimal personhood would provide the required principle of continuity, and memory would provide evidence for such continuity, between death and resurrection.
