We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2009
Images of myself being Napoleon can scarcely merely be images of the physical figure of Napoleon. … They will rather be images of, for instance, the desolation at Austerlitz as viewed by me vaguely aware of my short stature and my cockaded hat, my hand in my tunic.
At the end of “The Imagination and the Self,” Bernard Williams uncovers a common confusion about the range of thoughts in which the metaphysics of personal identity is implicated. When I imagine being someone else, I can be described as imagining that I am the other person – which sounds as if I am imagining a relation of identity between that person and me, David Velleman. As Williams points out, however, this particular way of imagining that I am another person is not really about me or my identity with anyone.
If my approach to imagining that I am Napoleon, for example, is to imagine being Napoleon, then I simply imagine a particular situation as experienced by Napoleon. I imagine the landscape at Austerlitz as seen through Napoleon's eyes, the sounds of battle as heard through his ears, the nap of a tunic as felt by his hand. Although Napoleon doesn't appear in the resulting mental image, he does appear in the content of my imagining, since I am imagining Austerlitz specifically as experienced by him.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
