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Personal Identity

Sortals

(Text as at 26/11/2007 23:25:26)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Using Howard Robinson’s terminology ("Robinson (Howard) - Dualism (Stanford)"), the Ultimate Sort of a thing is that property¹ without which the thing ceases to exist. However, an individual falling under a Phase² Sortal can lose the property that defines the phase without ceasing to exist. Ultimate Sorts are presumably the same as Baker’s Primary Kinds³, though I can’t remember if she has an analogue of a Phase Sortal. The standard example is of a HUMAN BEING⁴ (as the Ultimate Sort) and CHILD (as a Phase Sortal). So, is personhood⁵ an attribute of a human being, like “childhood”, that a human being can either possess or lack, or are persons ontologically⁶ separate from “their” human beings?

Wiggins⁷ argues that we can’t talk of the persistence⁸ conditions of anything until we know what sort it is. Olson claims that it’s futile to talk of the persistence conditions of persons per se – if human beings, God and angels are all persons – since their persistence conditions (assuming the existence of God and angels, for the sake of the argument) are completely different. This lack of a common set of persistence conditions would indicate that PERSON is not an Ultimate Sort.

I (intend to) discuss the sorts that we may fall under in the Note on “What are We?⁹”.