Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality
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Book Description
As witnessed by recent films such as Fight Club and Identity, our culture is obsessed with multiple personality—a phenomenon raising intriguing questions about personal identity. This study offers both a full-fledged philosophical theory of personal identity and a systematic account of multiple personality. Gunnarsson combines the methods of analytic philosophy with close hermeneutic and phenomenological readings of cases from different fields, focusing on psychiatric and psychological treatises, self-help books, biographies, and fiction. He develops an original account of personal identity (the authorial correlate theory) and offers a provocative interpretation of multiple personality: in brief, "multiples" are right about the metaphysics but wrong about the facts.
Table of Contents
I. Introduction 1. Am I Alone in My Body? 2. Multiple Personality 3. Personal Identity II. Diachronic Identity 4. What I Am Most Fundamentally 5. The Duplication Problem and the Unity Reaction 6. My Body 7. The Various Senses of "Personal Identity" III. Multiple Personality and Individuation 8. Morton Prince's Seminal Case Study The Dissociation of a Personality 9. Criticism of Other Philosophical Accounts of Multiple Personality 10. Sharing My Body 11. A Criterion of Individuation 12. Multiple Personality in Therapeutic and Biographic Discourses 13. Multiple Personality in Literary Discourses
Author(s)
Biography
Logi Gunnarsson is Professor of Philosophy at University of Potsdam, Germany.
Reviews
'A fine contribution to the discussion of the phenomenon of multiple personality and, more broadly, to issues of personal identity. The analysis is sharp; the writing, clear and succinct.' – John P. Lizza, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
'Gunnarsson, with great scholarship and clarity, provides a fresh and innovative analysis of multiple personality and personal identity by providing an approach that ties a theory of personal identity with multiple personality. This book is of interest especially for academicians and students from variety of disciplines. I also found this book very useful for a course on philosophy of self or personal identity.' – Kamuran Godelek, Cag University, Turkey Metapsychology Online Reviews