Notes
- Contributors “from all sides of the debate” – both established and new names – are asked to submit their own work in the light of "Kolak (Daniel) - I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics".
- Catterson has made a contribution to the volume ("Catterson (Troy) - Changing the subject: on the subject of subjectivity"), which betrays a stance – the simple view1 – that may have biased his “take” on the state of the debate, which is far from what I had taken it to be.
- Catterson sees the sides in the debate as split between2:-
- “Those who claim there is no self, or that personal identity is at heart an empty question”, and
- “Those who deny this claim and view the self as a substance that cannot be reduced to more basic ontological categories”.
- Catterson claims that the issue is epistemological, which strikes me as a bit odd as he’s just claimed it to be metaphysical.
- The issue has to do with whether knowledge has to be objective, and that we must understand ourselves as part of nature that exists irrespective of us and our perspective on it. This seems the default stance, so any attack on it is important (if irritating).
Comment:
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 2:
- This is a rather pejorative way of describing those who adopt a reductionist view of PID.
- Hardly anyone takes the nihilist view that “we don’t exist”.
- What reductionists claim is that “we” are most fundamentally something other than persons.
- They – in general – would deny – I would have thought – that they adopted either of the stances predicated of them.
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