Death and Fulfilment, or Would the Real Mr. Dostoyevsky Stand Up?

Abstract

Philosophers have devoted much attention to a series of issues grouped under the heading ‘the problem of personal identity’. In most of these discussions the focus has been the question of identity over time and the issues confronted have been basically logical or metaphysical. Students enrolled in philosophy classes dealing with such topics often express a sense of disappointment or frustration, for, of course, they belong to a culture in which the jargon of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ identity belongs to a rather different intellectual context heavy with the overtones of existentialism or with the suggestion of psychoanalysis. Anglo-Saxon philosophers have tended to bypass these ways of construing questions of personal identity; sometimes for good reason, sometimes not.