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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
There are significant numbers of well-documented cases of the following general kind. At the age of 3 or 4 a child starts to make claims about his past which clearly do not correspond to anything that has happened in his present life. He claims to remember living in a certain place, doing certain things, being with certain people, and so on. It is then found that these memory claims fit the life of a person who died shortly before the child was born. The accuracy of the memory claims is striking and there seems to be no possible normal explanation of this. The child also has certain character traits, interests and skills which correspond closely to those of the one who died; and, perhaps, a physical characteristic, such as a birthmark or wound, which closely resembles a characteristic of the earlier individual.
1 See, for example, Stevenson, Ian, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University Press of Virginia, 1974).Google Scholar The following case is taken from his The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations (M. C. Peto, 1961) pp. 20–1.Google Scholar The case was originally reported in Grant, J., Far Memory (Harper and Bros., 1956).Google Scholar
2 One clear statement can be found in his paper ‘The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, CLXIV, 5 (1977).Google Scholar
3 Ibid. pp. 305.
4 Does this mean that the more evidence of this kind we find the less compelling it will be?
5 Ibid. pp. 305
6 See Williams, Bernard, ‘Personal Identity and Individuation’ and ‘Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity’, both in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In my presentation of the argument I follow Derek Parfit's reading of Williams. See Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1984), section 91.Google Scholar
7 There are, I believe, awkward questions here about what counts as being a ‘fact about him’. But we can sidestep these for the moment for my point will, I think, have been made provided that my examples are analogous in the relevant respect with that with which we are concerned.
8 See also Herbert, R., ‘Puzzle Cases and Earthquakes’, Analysis, XXVIII 3 (1968).Google Scholar
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