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What Matters in Survival. Seminar of the Moscow Center For Consciousness Studies

5 January, 2022

The seminar is dedicated to the book by Douglas Ehring "What Matters in Survival: Personal Identity and other Possibilities".


At the center of Ehring's research is the question of what matters in survival: what relationship connects a person at a given time and a person at some other time, which would allow us to talk about the preservation of personality in time and could serve as a basis for our concern about those personalities that we will become in the future. According to the standard position, such a relationship is identity; however, as Derek Parfit convincingly shows, this position is erroneous: the identity of a person in time does not matter in the question of survival. This view may seem rather counterintuitive, but Ehring believes that Parfit was not radical enough in this matter. Ehring develops Parfitt's ideas to the position of nihilism regarding survival, according to which there is no such relationship that would preserve a person in time. Whether in this case concern for one's own future is justified and what the grounds for accepting this kind of nihilism are - we will discuss at our seminar.

Speakers: Andrey Mertsalov and Evgeny Loginov
Participants: A. Yashin, A. Besedin, V. Vasilyev, A. Kostikova, A. Kuznetsov