Summary and Analysis of Perry’s “First Night”

Perry’s account of the first night of philosophical debate includes many small arguments which all are about the possibility of an afterlife. The conclusion to the one argument, which this paper will focus on, is one that the dying philosopher Weirob asserts. She concludes that we are not in fact judging immaterial souls when we interact with people everyday. Her conclusion is supported by her premises that:
1) If identities of persons were really consistent of identities of immaterial souls that are unobservable, and that this is an “a priori” fact, then judgments that we make everyday about friends etc. are really judgments about such souls.
2) But if these judgments were really about souls they would be groundless because souls are unobservable.
3) But our judgments about persons are not all simply groundless and silly…
4) So we must not be judging of immaterial souls after all.
Miller objects to this argument by first saying that there is after all a w...