¶ Me
RBF Definitions
In a sense, my glasses–I’m very farsighted and have been wearing glasses since I was four years old–have become a part of me. I recall being invited in 1930 to speak at Dartmouth College, in what they call Dartmouth Hall. Seventeen years later, in 1947, I was asked to speak at Dartmouth again–and again spoke in Dartmouth Hall. After being introduced as having been there 17 years before, I stood up and said that while I didn’t like to be contradictory, actually I hadn’t been there before. My host looked a little surprised, and I pointed out that in the interim Dartmouth Hall had burned down and they had rebuilt it. Moreover, in that 17 years, all my flesh had completely changed–there was none of the 1930 flesh left. In fact, the only important physical evidence that ‘I’ had been there 17 years before were my eyeglasses: they were the same ones as before. But nothing else about me was the same. Quite interesting to discover that part of the function ‘me’ was really more permanent than, yet not of, my integral flesh." Cite RBF in Franklin Lecture, Auburn, Ala., 1970
