the body. Proponents of the memory criterion of personal identity must face the famous duplication argument, which seems to entail that memory is not, after all, a sufficient condition for personal identity across the gap. Those who require bodily continuity as the criterion of personal identity, as does Aquinas, have to insist that the glorified bodies of the resurrected be numerically identical to the ordinary human bodies that they possessed at death. This leads to a number of puzzle cases involving bodies that share the same matter at the moment of death, a problem by no means limited to the obvious case of cannibalism. It is very likely that each one of us possesses some of the atoms that belonged to other human beings at the point of death and even conceivable that there is someone who, at the point of death, is mostly or even entirely composed of such atoms upon whom other deceased persons have a prior claim. If resurrection requires that one get one’s exact body back, how could such a person be resurrected at all? These objections are probably not insuperable, but they do need to be effectively answered. The dualist view scouted here is not troubled by them. If neither memory nor bodily continuity are sufficient for personal identity, what will do? My suggestion, one made by other dualists, is that personal identity is ontologically constituted by The matter of the body is constantly changing and the body itself constantly sameness of soul. gaining and losing qualitative attributes. The metaphysical possibility of brain transplants, and so on seems to undermine the claim that sameness of body is a necessary condition for personal identity. Yet, for the same reason, the possibility that someone could my memory clean and replace it wholesale with a set of putative memories that were in “scrub” fact completely fabricated seemingly gives the lie to the notion that continuity of memory is either necessary or sufficient for one’s being the same person. On the dualism recommended here, however, the soul is a sempiternal entity not subject to temporal passage, and thus neither
the body. Proponents of the memory criterion of personal identity must face the famous duplication argument, which seems to entail that memory is not, after all, a sufficient condition for personal identity across the gap. Those who require bodily continuity as the criterion of personal identity, as does Aquinas, have to insist that the glorified bodies of the resurrected be numerically identical to the ordinary human bodies that they possessed at death. This leads to a number of puzzle cases involving bodies that share the same matter at the moment of death, a problem by no means limited to the obvious case of cannibalism. It is very likely that each one of us possesses some of the atoms that belonged to other human beings at the point of death and even conceivable that there is someone who, at the point of death, is mostly or even entirely composed of such atoms upon whom other deceased persons have a prior claim. If resurrection requires that one get one’s exact body back, how could such a person be resurrected at all? These objections are probably not insuperable, but they do need to be effectively answered. The dualist view scouted here is not troubled by them. If neither memory nor bodily continuity are sufficient for personal identity, what will do? My suggestion, one made by other dualists, is that personal identity is ontologically constituted by sameness of soul. The matter of the body is constantly changing and the body itself constantly gaining and losing qualitative attributes. The metaphysical possibility of brain transplants, and so on seems to undermine the claim that sameness of body is a necessary condition for personal identity. Yet, for the same reason, the possibility that someone could “scrub” my memory clean and replace it wholesale with a set of putative memories that were in fact completely fabricated seemingly gives the lie to the notion that continuity of memory is either necessary or sufficient for one’s being the same person. On the dualism recommended here, however, the soul is a sempiternal entity not subject to temporal passage, and thus neither
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