Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

 

From Persons to Selfing: Some Developments of Parfit’s Legacy

Issue: Issue 09 • Author/s: Michele Di Francesco, Massimo Marraffa, Alfredo Paternoster
Topics: Metaphysics, Philosophy of mind

In this paper we shall discuss some aspects of Parfit’s thought in connection with what we regard as a promising, quasi-naturalist approach to the self. The focus is not so much on the concept of person (considered as the starting point of a metaphysics of person), which—for our present purposes—we take essentially to be a forensic notion; our point is, rather, that certain ideas developed by Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) may be viewed as a component of a bottom-up account of the self that combines psychobiological and narrativist…