Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.758

   If a thing-at-\(t_{1}\) were identical with a thing-at-\(t_{2}\), then they should share all their properties. What sort of identity is it, if not that? But if the properties at different times are incompatible, then a contradiction follows. Because they emphatically took the view that contradictions are never true, the great Buddhist logicians Dharmakirti (C7th CE) and his commentator Dharmottara (C8–9th CE), who had certainly read their Aristotle, deduced that identity over time does not exist (see Scherbatsky (1930) vol 2). This is the Buddhist doctrine of moments, essentially an ontology o…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/change-and-inconsistency.md

2. 02 · blog0.751

   However, as David DeGrazia has emphasized, this line of reasoning rests on an undefended (and controversial) assumption that we are essentially persons (DeGrazia 1999). For if we are not essentially persons — but, rather, for example, conscious minds of some other, less complex kind — an individual may very well lose the properties of a person without any threat to his numerical survival. Nonetheless, even if we are not essentially persons, on the psychological view of our identity, we are essentially defined by our psychological properties. If these properties change drastically enough, the o…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/advance-directives-and-substitute-decision-making.md

3. 03 · blog0.751

   And, as Buchanan and Brock see it, the earlier self has “something like a property right… to determine what happens to [his] nonperson successor” (166). That is, if one ceases to exist by turning into a nonperson, one retains a quasi-property right to control the resulting nonperson, presumably in much the same way that, when one ceases to exist by turning into a corpse, one has a quasi-property right to control the resulting corpse. Hence, on this approach, even if the earlier and current self are distinct individuals, the earlier self has the authority to determine what happens to the curren…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/advance-directives-and-substitute-decision-making.md

4. 04 · blog0.749

   If at every t God created ex nihilo , is it really x which exists at successive instants rather than a series of simulacra? Since there is no patient subject on which the agent acts in creation, how is it that it is the identical subject which is re-created each instant out of nothing rather than a numerically distinct, but similar, subject? (Craig 1998, 184) One way to defend continuous creation theory from the persistence objection is to argue that it is possible to create the same object more than once. Quinn distinguishes between creating something (bringing about its existence) and introd…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/creation-and-conservation.md

5. 05 · blog0.746

   In the Pohapāda Sutta (D I.178–203), for instance, the Buddha compares someone who posits an unseen seer in order to explain our introspective awareness of cognitions, to a man who has conceived a longing for the most beautiful woman in the world based solely on the thought that such a woman must surely exist. And in the Tevijja Sutta (D I.235–52), the Buddha rejects the claim of certain Brahmins to know the path to oneness with Brahman, on the grounds that no one has actually observed this Brahman. This makes more plausible the assumption that the argument has as an implicit premise the claim…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/buddha.md

6. 06 · gutenberg0.745

   All soul is immortal, for she is the source of all motion both in herself and in others. Her form may be described in a figure as a composite nature made up of a charioteer and a pair of winged steeds. The steeds of the gods are immortal, but ours are one mortal and the other immortal. The immortal soul soars upwards into the heavens, but the mortal drops her plumes and settles upon the earth.

   gutenberg/PG-1636-phaedrus/PG-1636.txt

7. 07 · blog0.745

   The similarity to the divine is not part of the inference here but simply an illustrative comparison. However, Mansfeld has recently pointed out that the doxographical report in Aetius is just a paraphrase of Aristotle’s earlier report with the significant addition that the soul is self-moving. Examination of the context in Aetius shows that the self-motion of the soul, which is attested independently for Plato and Xenocrates, was projected back on Pythagoras and Thales, who are very unlikely to have held such a view. This context and Aristotle’s failure to assign self-motion to Alcmaeon makes…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/alcmaeon.md

8. 08 · gutenberg0.744

   One of the company here remarked that this was inconsistent with the old assertion that opposites generated opposites. But that, replies Socrates, was affirmed, not of opposite ideas either in us or in nature, but of opposition in the concrete--not of life and death, but of individuals living and dying. When this objection has been removed, Socrates proceeds: This doctrine of the mutual exclusion of opposites is not only true of the opposites themselves, but of things which are inseparable from them. For example, cold and heat are opposed; and fire, which is inseparable from heat, cannot co-ex…

   gutenberg/PG-1658-phaedo/PG-1658.txt

9. 09 · blog0.742

   3.4 Consciousness, the Soul, and Personal Identity Henry Dodwell publicly defended the view that the soul is naturally mortal but is made immortal by God only at a baptism performed by someone properly ordained. Clarke wrote an open letter defending the soul’s “natural” immortality. Furthermore, all souls survive bodily death, the soul remains in a state of (literal or metaphorical) sleep until the final judgment, the souls of those not admitted to heaven are destroyed at the final judgment, and there is no hell of eternal suffering. [ 3 ] Employing what Kant (1781, A351) dubbed the “Achilles …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/samuel-clarke.md

10. 10 · blog0.741

    On dualist assumptions, personal identity is preserved by the persistence of the soul between death and resurrection. But for materialism, nothing bridges the spatio-temporal gap between the body that perishes and that body resurrected. Without such a bridge, how can the “resurrected” person be identical with the person who died? Considerable ingenuity has been expended in the search for an answer to this question. Without doubt, the most popular materialist option here is the “re-creation” theory, according to which, at some time after a person’s death, God re-creates the person by creating a…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/afterlife.md