Sydney Shoemaker
If your brain were transplanted into another body, you would go with it: what matters is psychological continuity.
Life
Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022), born in Boise (Idaho), was an American philosopher, a professor at Cornell University. He worked on the mind, self-knowledge and personal identity. In Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963) he imagines the case of "Brownson", where one man's brain is transplanted into another man's body. He went on to defend a psychological and materialist view of personal identity.
Main works
Studies how we know ourselves and by what criteria we say a person is the same; contains the Brownson case.
Argues that remembering one's past is a psychological link, which he generalizes as "quasi-memory".
A two-part debate: Shoemaker defends the materialist view, Swinburne the dualist view.
In his own words
« The question of what most people would say if the imagined events occurred is of course a factual question, and not a question for philosophers to decide. »
« First, it clearly cannot be said that in making this judgement people would be mistaken; at most it can be said that in making it they would show that they had adopted new criteria of personal identity and that their judgement would not be in accord with our present criteria. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe defends a materialist, functionalist account of the mind and of persons: mental states are defined by what they do, and are realized in matter.
Shoemaker, « Personal Identity: A Materialist's Account », dans Shoemaker et Swinburne, Personal Identity (1984) ; « Functionalism and Qualia » (1975)