Online research in philosophy

Four non-Cartesian conceptions of a person are considered. I argue tor one of these, a position called animalism. I reject the idea that a (human) person coincides with, but is numerically distinct from, a certain human animal. Coinciding physical beings would both be psychological subjects. I argue that such subjects could not engage in self-reference. Since self-reference (or the capacity tor self-reference) is a necessary condition for being a person, no physical subject coincident with another such subject can be a person. I take all of this to support the view that we (human persons) are identical with human animals.

What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can be fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. The Constitution View yields answers to the questions 'What am I most fundamentally?', 'What is a person?', and 'What is the relation between human persons and their bodies'? Baker argues that the complex mental property of first-person perspective enables one to conceive of one's body and mental states as one's own.

This paper seeks to overturn the claim that Cartesian arguments for dualism based on the conceivable separation of person and body lack warrant, since it is just as conceivable that persons are identical with their bodies as it is that persons and their bodies are distinct. If the thesis of the paper is cogent, then it is not as easy to imagine person-body identity as many anti-Cartesians suppose.

This paper discusses the “constitution view” of human persons, as set forth by Lynne Rudder Baker in her book, Persons and Bodies. The metaphysical notion of constitution is explained and briefly defended. It is shown, however, that the view that human persons are constituted by their bodies faces difficulties in specifying the “person-favorable conditions” under which a human body constitutes a person. Furthermore, none of the arguments in support of the claim that humans are constituted by (but not identical with) their bodies is persuasive. It is proposed that the mind-body theory of “emergent dualism” offers many of the benefits of the “constitution view” without sharing in its drawbacks.

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person’s mental states and behaviours. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about second-person interac- tion from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another’s behav- iour. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of ‘primary intersubjectivity’ as merely precursory to the- ory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions.

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person's mental states and behaviors. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about secondperson interaction from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another's behavior. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely, that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of "primary intersubjectivity" as merely precursory to theory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions.

This paper seeks to overturn the claim that Cartesian arguments for dualism based on the conceivable separation of person and body lack warrant, since it is just as conceivable that persons are identical with their bodies as it is that persons and their bodies are distinct. If the thesis of the paper is cogent, then it is not as easy to imagine person-body identity as many anti-Cartesians suppose.

This paper discusses the “constitution view” of human persons, as set forth by Lynne Rudder Baker in her book, Persons and Bodies. The metaphysical notion of constitution is explained and briefly defended. It is shown, however, that the view that human persons are constituted by their bodies faces difficulties in specifying the “person-favorable conditions” under which a human body constitutes a person. Furthermore, none of the arguments in support of the claim that humans are constituted by (but not identical with) their bodies is persuasive. It is proposed that the mind-body theory of “emergent dualism” offers many of the benefits of the “constitution view” without sharing in its drawbacks.

Persons and Their Minds returns persons to the center of philosophy of mind, and advocates retiring materialism, mind-brain dualism and biological naturalism to ...