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A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality

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A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
First edition
AuthorJohn Perry
Subjectpersonal identity
Published1978
PublisherHackett Publishing Company
Pages56 pp.
ISBN9780915144532

A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is a book by the philosopher John Perry.[1][2][3] It is intended as an undergraduate textbook[4] and has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Persian and Korean.[5]

Content

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It deals with standard problems in the theory of personal identity and its relation to immortality and life after death in the form of a dialogue between a terminally ill university professor at a small Midwestern college, Gretchen Weirob, and her two friends, Sam Miller and Dave Cohen. The views represented include those of Bernard Williams, John Locke, and Derek Parfit. The format of associating different philosophical positions with different characters in a dialogue recalls David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Reception

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Samuel Clark (from Lancaster University) believes the book to do "a good job of setting out several different views in contest with each other."[4] Eric Todd Olson calls it "an eminently readable discussion of the soul and life after death."[6]

References

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  1. ^ Mills, Andrew. "Perry Dialogue Study Questions". Otterbein University. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  2. ^ "Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality". Oberlin College. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  3. ^ Facenda, Neusa (April 2010). "Analysis of Perry's Theories of Personal Identity". Magnificat: A Journal of Undergraduate Nonfiction. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  4. ^ a b Clark, Samuel (2013). "Hume's Uses of Dialogue". Hume Studies. 39 (1): 61–76. doi:10.1353/hms.2013.0005. S2CID 143148351.
  5. ^ Pirhayati, Ali (December 2023). "A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (review)". Intellectual Explorations. 2 (2). ISSN 2980-9614.
  6. ^ Olson, Eric T.; Segal, Aaron (4 August 2023). Do We Have a Soul?: A Debate. Taylor & Francis. p. 223. ISBN 978-1-000-84559-4.
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