Points of Concern

This is a critical review of Raymond Martin's 'Self-Concern' (1998), focusing especially on his criticism of Parfit's use of fission thought-experiments and his own 'fission rejuvenation' thought-experiment

Reconsidering a transplant: A response to Wagner

Nils-Frederic Wagner takes issue with my argument that influential critics of “transplant” thought experiments make two cardinal mistakes. He responds that the mistakes I identify are not mistakes at all. The mistakes are rather on my part, in that I have not taken into account the conceptual genesis of personhood, that my view of thought experiments is idiosyncratic and possibly self-defeating, and in that I have ignored important empirical evidence about the relationship between brains and minds. I argue that my case still stands and that transplant thought experiments can do damage to rivals of a psychological continuity theory of personal identity like Marya Schechtman’s Person Life View

Placing the Czech shadow banking sector under the light

The size of the shadow banking sector (SBS) has more than doubled in the Czech Republic over the last decade. This places a potential burden on policy makers. On the one hand, the SBS complements regular banking by expanding access to credit and investments, enabling better risk sharing and maturity transformation, and supporting market liquidity. On the other hand, SBS activities can put the stability of the financial system at risk and amplify its procyclicality by exacerbating the buildup of leverage and asset price bubbles. We implement a FAVAR model of the Czech economy to determine the impact of macroeconomic factors on the SBS. We find that the SBS: (i) is sensitive to changes in market interest rates and term spread; (ii) exhibits great procyclicality; (iii) can act as a complement to regular banking and satisfy some additional demand for credit. We also define some potential risks of continued growth of the SBS, linked to our empirical evidence.Web of Science29128

Understanding ourselves better

INTRODUCTION: Marya Schechtman and Grant Gillett acknowledge that my case in ‘The misunderstandings of the Self-Understanding View’ (2013) has some merits, but neither is moved to change their position and accept that the Psychological View has more going for it (and the Self-Understanding View less) than Schechtman originally contended. Schechtman thinks her case could be better expressed, and then the deficiencies of the Psychological View will be manifest. That view is committed to Locke’s insight about the importance of phenomenological connections to identity, but cannot do justice to this insight and as a result fails to explain things that it should.Web of Scienc

The misunderstandings of the Self-Understanding View

Marya Schechtman has argued that contemporary attempts to save Locke’s account of personal identity suffer the same faults that are to be found in Locke, among which is an inability to capture the role our unconscious states play. To avoid these problems, she advocates giving up the mainstream Psychological View and adopting a narrative account like her ‘Self-Understanding’ View that, she claims, has the further virtue of maintaining important insights from Locke. My paper argues that it is misleading to understand the Psychological View as sharing Locke’s commitments and that (partly as a result) Schechtman has not isolated a problem that needs fixing or any reason for going narrative. It further argues that the Self-Understanding View is a great deal more at odds with Locke’s view than Schechtman cares to acknowledge.Web of Scienc

Martha Nussbaum and the Foundations of Ethics: Identity, Morality and Thought-Experiments

Martha Nussbaum has argued in support of the view (supposedly that of Aristotle) that we can, through thought-experiments involving personal identity, find an objective foundation for moral thought without having to appeal to any authority independent of morality. I compare the thought-experiment from Plato’s Philebus that she presents as an example to other thought-experiments involving identity in the literature and argue that this reveals a tension between the sources of authority which Nussbaum invokes for her thought-experiment. I also argue that each of her sources of authority presents further difficulties for her project. Finally, I argue that it is not clear that her thought-experiment is one that actually involves identity in any crucial way. As a result, the case she offers does not offer any satisfactory support for her view on the relation between identity, morality and thought-experiments, but we do gain some insights into what that relation really is along the way

Partial differential systems with nonlocal nonlinearities: Generation and solutions

We develop a method for generating solutions to large classes of evolutionary partial differential systems with nonlocal nonlinearities. For arbitrary initial data, the solutions are generated from the corresponding linearized equations. The key is a Fredholm integral equation relating the linearized flow to an auxiliary linear flow. It is analogous to the Marchenko integral equation in integrable systems. We show explicitly how this can be achieved through several examples including reaction-diffusion systems with nonlocal quadratic nonlinearities and the nonlinear Schrodinger equation with a nonlocal cubic nonlinearity. In each case we demonstrate our approach with numerical simulations. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach and how it might be extended.Comment: 4 figure