A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality

A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is a book by the philosopher John Perry.^[1][2][3] It is intended as an undergraduate textbook^[4] and has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Persian and Korean.^[5]

A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality

First edition
Author	John Perry
Subject	personal identity
Published	1978
Publisher	Hackett Publishing Company
Pages	56 pp.
ISBN	9780915144532

Content

It deals with standard problems in the theory of personal identity and its relation to immortality and life after death in the form of a dialogue between a terminally ill university professor at a small Midwestern college, Gretchen Weirob, and her two friends, Sam Miller and Dave Cohen. The views represented include those of Bernard Williams, John Locke, and Derek Parfit. The format of associating different philosophical positions with different characters in a dialogue recalls David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Reception

Samuel Clark (from Lancaster University) believes the book to do "a good job of setting out several different views in contest with each other."^[4] Eric Todd Olson calls it "an eminently readable discussion of the soul and life after death."^[6]