Persons, Misc

Science starts out with the idea of a person as billions of neurons housed in a body that is a cloud of particles. Common sense starts out with the idea of a person having capacities belonging to a single individual. The common sense person does not have parts. Our objectifying science slowly takes over the person as it tends toward physical materialism. Where will it end? What is being gradually pushed out of the world? If science had already taken over, (...) if the categories of neuroscience were complete, then it would be possible to speculate about its relation to earlier stages of thought. However, that is not the situation. The categories of science have yet to emerge. The puzzling character of new scientific objects reveals that we are on the threshold of profound conceptual change. The.. (shrink)

Science starts out with the idea of a person as billions of neurons housed in a body that is a cloud of particles. Common sense starts out with the idea of a person having capacities belonging to a single individual. The common sense person does not have parts. Our objectifying science slowly takes over the person as it tends toward physical materialism. Where will it end? What is being gradually pushed out of the world? If science had already taken over, (...) if the categories of neuroscience were complete, then it would be possible to speculate about its relation to earlier stages of thought. However, that is not the situation. The categories of science have yet to emerge. The puzzling character of new scientific objects reveals that we are on the threshold of profound conceptual change. The Humanities are at a crossroad. Do the Humanities scoff at the encroachment of science and risk the fate of those who resisted the Copernican revolution? Do they embrace the changes only to be burned at the stake like those who accepted the Copernican revolution? I suggest that the Humanities mobilize their collective power to create the categories in terms of which science will explicate the very idea of a person. Over the last fifty years, philosophers in the Kantian tradition have offered strategies for developing the new categories in humanistic terms. One approach follows “color” and “consciousness” through their passage from a common sense image of the world to a developing scientific image. It is a journey that illustrates the problems and the puzzles ahead. It indicates the perils of the next recategorization of the world. (shrink)

The concept of personhood in the Abrahamic tradition opens up new dimensions in contrast with the ancient world, especially the relationality and incommunicability of the person as a source of his or her dignity. However, these notions also originate their own set of contemporary challenges and problems. A proposal will be made as to how to overcome these problems by way of an integration of older insights on substance, act, and potency.

This contribution reflects on Nicholas Rescher's discussion of “process and persons” in his book Process Metaphysics. Its main purposes are to offer conceptual commentary on some of Rescher's terms, and to suggest some options for process thinking more radical than Rescher's, partly motivated by recent developments in science and philosophy. First, a brief analysis of the relation between process and time is presented, emphasizing irreversibility and temporal holism as crucial for a processual worldview. Second, instability and transiency are introduced as (...) key concepts for a better understanding of notions such as creativity and freedom. Third, the importance of the sociocultural domain is pointed out in addition to psychological and biophysical factors for the constitution of personhood. And fourth, it is argued that such an extension can be endowed with ontological significance in the framework of a non-reductive and non-hierarchical ontological relativity. (shrink)

The subject of this dissertation is fetal ontology, not the morality of abortion. I try to show that zygotes are not human beings. ;Unlike many philosophers, I am unwilling to give 'human being' to the biologists. It should not be confused with 'Homo sapiens' or any other taxonomic term of biology. On the other hand, it should not be confused with 'person' either. ;I investigate a number of attempts to fix the point at which we first become human beings. None (...) of them, I try to show, support the conclusion that zygotes are human beings. The strongest argument for the humanity of the zygote, I believe, derives its conclusion from the premisses that we are essentially human beings and that we were once zygotes. While I mention some reasons for thinking that the first of its premisses may not be true, I am mainly occupied in challenging the second. I formulate and defend the idea that we come into existence gradually . At the time "our" zygotes existed, we did not fully exist. So either "our" zygotes did not fully exist then either, or else we were not then plainly identical with them. In the latter case either we were "indeterminately" identical with them or we were not identical with them at all . In any case we were once zygotes at best only to the extent that we then existed--i.e., hardly at all. ;The most likely view concerning our beginnings is that we both come into existence and come to be human beings gradually, during a period which corresponds at least roughly with our gestation. (shrink)

I introduce and argue for a Priority Principle, according to which we exemplify certain of our mental properties in the primary or non-derivative sense. I then apply this principle to several debates in the metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

How should we count people who have two cerebral hemispheres that cooperate to support one mental life at the level required for personhood even though each hemisphere can be disconnected from the other and support its "own" divergent mental life at that level? On the standard method of counting people, there is only one person sitting in your chair and thinking your thoughts even if you have two cerebral hemispheres of this kind. Is this method accurate? In this paper, I (...) argue that it is not, and I advocate an alternative I call the Multiple Person View. (shrink)

So, let us begin in the middle of things. There are two senses in which I think that philosophy must begin in the middle of things: The first is epistemological: I think that the Cartesian ideal of finding an absolute starting point without any presuppositions is illusory. The most that we can do is to be aware of our presuppositions; we cannot eliminate them. Wherever we choose to start, we are in the middle of things epistemologically. The second way in (...) which I think that philosophy must begin in the middle of things is ontological: The objects of my interest at least initially are medium-sized things—primarily people, but also nonhuman organisms and other natural objects, and artifacts, and artworks. These are the kinds of things that populate the world that we all unavoidably contend with and care about. And it is that world—the everyday life world—that I am ultimately interested in understanding. (shrink)

Bransen takes the first question to pose “the problem of man’s uniqueness,” and his ultimate aim is to dissolve that problem. His method of dissolving it is by way of a detailed answer to the second question, which is the most fundamental. I want to show that Bransen’s answer to the second question actually provides an answer to each of the other questions, and that instead of dissolving the problem of man’s uniqueness (posed by question #1), what he offers is (...) really a straightforward solution—albeit a partly normative one. To see this, we must look beyond Bransen’s answer to the metaphysical presuppositions on which, I believe, it rests. (shrink)

Mark Johnston takes reality to be wholly objective or impersonal, and aims to show that the inevitability of death does not obliterate goodness in such a naturalistic world. Crucial to his argument is the claim that there are no persisting selves. After critically discussing Johnston's arguments, I set out a view of persons that shares Johnston's view that there are no selves, but disagrees about the prospects of goodness in a wholly impersonal world. On my view, a wholly objective world (...) is ontologically incomplete: Persons have irreducible first-person properties. My aim is to show that we can reject selves, but that we can retain persons and their essential first-person properties as ontologically significant. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. Some versions take "extended selves" be to relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. First, I show how EM can be seen as an extension of traditional views of mind. Then, after voicing a couple of qualms about EM, I reject EM in favor of a more modest hypothesis that recognizes enduring subjects of (...) experience and agents with integrated bodies. Nonetheless, my modest hypothesis allows subpersonal states to have nonbiological parts that play essential roles in cognitive processing. I present empirical warrant for this modest hypothesis and show how it leaves room for science and religion to coexist. (shrink)

Bransen takes the first question to pose ―the problem of man‘s uniqueness,‖ and his ultimate aim is to dissolve that problem. His method of dissolving it is by way of a detailed answer to the second question, which is the most fundamental. I want to show that Bransen‘s answer to the second question actually provides an answer to each of the other questions, and that instead of dissolving the problem of man‘s uniqueness (posed by question #1), what he offers is (...) really a straightforward solution—albeit a partly normative one. To see this, we must look beyond Bransen‘s answer to the metaphysical presuppositions on which, I believe, it rests. normative. (shrink)

We human persons have an abiding interest in understanding what kind of beings we are. However, it is not obvious how to attain such an understanding. Traditional analytic metaphysicians start with a priori accounts of the most general, abstract features of the world— e.g., accounts of properties and particulars—features that, they claim, in no way depend upon us or our activity.1 Such accounts are formulated in abstraction from what is already known about persons and other things, and are used as (...) constraints on metaphysical investigation of everything else. So, if we accept traditional metaphysics, we should be prepared to yield to abstruse pronouncements—either by giving up our most secure beliefs about the world that we encounter or by abandoning our conception of what those beliefs are really about. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains and (...) microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects. (shrink)

In the large recent literature on the nature of human persons, persons are usually studied in isolation from the world in which they live. What persons are most fundamentally, philosophers say, are human animals, or brains, or perhaps souls -- without any consideration of the social and physical environments without which persons would not exist. In this article, I want to compensate for such overly narrow focus. Instead of beginning with the nature of persons cut off from any environment, I (...) shall begin with metaphysical consideration of the world of which persons are a part. I shall then briefly describe my view of persons, according to which persons are material objects like other concrete things in the world, but are unique in their first-person perspectives. Finally, I shall consider some of the special relations that persons, and only persons, have to other things in the world. (shrink)

According to the Constitution View of persons, a human person is wholly constituted by (but not identical to) a human organism. This view does justice both to our similarities to other animals and to our uniqueness. As a proponent of the Constitution View, I defend the thesis that the coming-into-existence of a human person is not simply a matter of the coming-into-existence of an organism, even if that organism ultimately comes to constitute a person. Marshalling some support from developmental psychology, (...) I give a broadly materialistic account of the coming-into-existence of a human person. I argue for the metaphysical superiority of the Constitution View to Biological Animalism, Thomistic Animalism, and other forms of Substance Dualism. I conclude by discussing the single implication of the Constitution View for thinking about abortion. Footnotesa Thanks to Gareth Matthews and Catherine E. Rudder for comments. I am also grateful to other contributors to this volume, especially Robert A. Wilson, Marya Schechtman, David Oderberg, Stephen Braude, and John Finnis. (shrink)

Throughout his illustrious career, Roderick Chisholm was concerned with the nature of persons. On his view, persons are what he called ‘entia per se.’ They exist per se, in their own right. I too have developed an account of persons—I call it the ‘Constitution View’—an account that is different in important ways from Chisholm’s. Here, however, I want to focus on a thesis that Chisholm and I agree on: that persons have ontological significance in virtue of being persons. Although I’ll (...) make the notion of ontological significance more precise later, the rough idea is that Fs (persons, or whatever) have ontological significance just in case a new F is a new thing and not just a change in some already-existing thing. (shrink)

1. Primary-kind properties. Rosenkrantz does not see how a single primary-kind property can be had by x essentially and by y contingently . He offers a reductio ad absurdum of the view that a primary can be had accidentally or derivatively. The reductio has as a premise the following: “[S]omething has a primarykind property, F-ness, derivatively only if the primary-kind property of a nonderivative F, i.e., the property which determines what a nonderivative F most fundamentally is, is nonderivative F-ness .” (...) However, this premise is simply a denial of my view. (shrink)

Eric T. Olson has argued that any view of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity has a consequence that he considers untenable—namely, that I was never an early-term fetus. I have several replies. First, the psychological-continuity view of personal identity does not entail the putative consequence; the appearance to the contrary depends on not distinguishing between de re and de dicto theses. Second, the putative consequence is not untenable anyway; the appearance to the contrary depends on not taking seriously (...) an idea that underlies a plausible view of persons that I call ‘the Constitution View’. Finally, Olson’s own “Biological View of personal identity” has liabilities of its own. (shrink)