Avatar and Philosophy by George A. Dunn

Author:George A. Dunn [Dunn, George A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118886762
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Continuity of the Self: Your Future Is in His Hands1

Plato and Aristotle share a basic metaphysical assumption about personal identity that is held by many people even today. In their book Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call this shared conjecture the “folk theory of essences.”2 It goes somewhat like this: “Every entity has an ‘essence’ or ‘nature,’ that is, a collection of properties that make it the kind of thing it is and is the causal source of its natural behavior.”3 Consider the savage, panther-like thanator, one of the first Pandoran creatures that Jake meets up close and personal. This creature seems to be genetically coded for predatory behavior. If we were to see one nuzzling up to Jake affectionately rather than trying to shred him with its teeth, we would probably say that it was “acting against its nature.”

It turns out that the folk theory of essences has a lot to do with how we think about ourselves, whether we have avatars or not. Again, Lakoff and Johnson:

We have in our conceptual systems a very general metaphor in which our Essence is part of our Subject – our subjective consciousness, our locus of thought, judgment, and will. Thus, who we essentially are is associated with how we think, what judgments we make, and how we choose to act. According to the folk theory, it is our Essence that, ideally, should determine our natural behavior.4

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.