Real People 'Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments'

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.