Core theme: Being human practice questions.

Reid's brave officer case — the boy flogged for stealing becomes the officer who remembers the flogging, and later the general who remembers the officer's deeds but not the flogging — is standardly used to press which objection to Locke?

• That the memory criterion makes identity intransitive, since the general both is and is not the boy
• That memory is a fallible faculty, so any criterion resting on it yields uncertain verdicts
• That the criterion presupposes what it explains, because genuine memory already implies identity
• That the criterion cannot be applied to beings who lack the language in which to report memories

Answer: That the memory criterion makes identity intransitive, since the general both is and is not the boy

Identity is transitive, so if the general is the officer and the officer is the boy, the general must be the boy — which direct memory denies. This is not Butler's circularity objection, which attacks the criterion for presupposing identity rather than for breaking transitivity.

In Parfit's teletransportation case a replica is assembled on Mars from a scan while the original body on Earth is destroyed. What conclusion does Parfit draw from such cases?

• That the replica is straightforwardly the same person, because it is built to the same bodily plan
• That questions of personal identity are settled by whichever answer the law and social practice adopt
• That such cases show the self to be an immaterial substance that survives physical destruction
• That what matters in survival is psychological continuity, not identity itself

Answer: That what matters in survival is psychological continuity, not identity itself

Parfit argues that in some cases there is no determinate answer to the identity question, and that this need not disturb us because the relation we care about is continuity and connectedness. This is stronger than the psychological criterion of identity, which still assumes that identity is what matters.

A student writes: 'Whenever I look inward I come across some perception — warmth, light, a pain — but never a further thing that is having them.' This introspective report is the starting point of which account of the self?

• The Cartesian account, on which the self is a thinking substance known with certainty
• Hume's bundle theory, on which the self is a collection of perceptions
• Berkeley's account, on which the self is an active spirit distinct from the ideas it perceives
• Reid's account, on which the self is directly known through the testimony of memory

Answer: Hume's bundle theory, on which the self is a collection of perceptions

Hume reports finding only perceptions and no impression of a persisting owner, so he treats the self as a bundle rather than a substance. Reid rejects the method itself: for him the self is not one more item to be found among the perceptions but the subject that memory and consciousness already presuppose.

Which claim is distinctive of Levinas's account of the encounter with another person?

• The other becomes intelligible to me by analogy with my own inner life
• The other is first of all a rival whose recognition must be won through struggle
• The face of the other issues a demand that precedes any theory I form about them
• The look of the other fixes me as an object and so threatens my freedom

Answer: The face of the other issues a demand that precedes any theory I form about them

Levinas holds that ethics is first philosophy: the claim made by the face comes before any knowledge of the other. This separates him from Sartre, for whom the look is primarily a threat to my freedom, and from Hegel, for whom recognition emerges from conflict.

The observation that pain might be realised by quite different physical structures in a human, an octopus and a possible machine is standardly used as an objection to which position?

• Substance dualism, which holds that mind and body are two distinct substances
• Type identity theory, which identifies each mental type with one physical type
• Eliminative materialism, which holds that the kinds of folk psychology do not exist
• Epiphenomenalism, which holds that mental events have no effects on the body

Answer: Type identity theory, which identifies each mental type with one physical type

Multiple realisability is incompatible with pairing each mental type with a single physical type, which is why it is taken to favour functionalism, where mental states are defined by causal role. It does not touch dualism, which was never committed to a type-to-type mapping in the first place.

What does Nagel's discussion of what it is like to be a bat aim to establish?

• That bats lack conscious experience, because their sensory world is inaccessible to us
• That mental states are identical with the brain states of the species that has them
• That objective description leaves out the subjective character of experience
• That we can know another creature's experience by imagining ourselves in its place

Answer: That objective description leaves out the subjective character of experience

The argument concerns the limits of a description given from no particular point of view, not the question whether bats are conscious, which Nagel assumes they are. Nagel himself does not conclude that physicalism is false, only that we cannot at present understand how it could be true.