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Personal Identity
Thesis - Chapter 03 (What is a Person?)
(Text as at 22/07/2014 22:23:31)
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AbstractThis chapter will canvass the various views of what Persons are and consider how important issues in this area are to my main concern of our identity.
Research Methodology
- Follow this Link1 for a generic statement of how I intend to pursue each Chapter.
- The method is broken down into 12, possibly iterative, stages.
- This Chapter is at Stage 2/3.
Chapter Introduction
- The main philosophical argument about Persons is whether PERSON is a substance-concept in its own right, or whether it is parasitic on other substance-concept(s).
- My own view is that Human Persons are phase_sortals2 of human animals, but other philosophers have more robust views of persons and think of them as substances in their own right.
- Famously, Locke3 held this view, and Lynne Rudder Baker4 is a contemporary exponent – her view being that human persons are constituted5 by, but not identical to, human animals.
- In this thesis, I’m only concerned with human persons, and – like most philosophers – allow that there can be non-human persons (God, gods, angels, aliens, robots, etc.)
- All this is predicated on deciding just what PERSONS are, which in turn depends somewhat on whether we take PERSON to be a natural kind concept, or something that is socially constructed and so not something the correct definition of we can discover.
- Further text to be supplied.
Main Text
- To be supplied.
Links to Books / Papers to be Addressed6
- In this Chapter I will consider the following papers or book chapters (together with some others referenced by these). There are doubtless many more that are relevant and which will be addressed in the course of the thesis, but these are probably sufficient to get us going.
- "Ayer (A.J.) - The Concept of a Person", Ayer
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Brief Reply to Rosenkrantz's Comments on my 'The Ontological Status of Persons'", Baker
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View", especially (in this context), … Baker
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons in the Material World",
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - The First-Person Perspective",
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - The Constitution View of Human Persons",
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Personal Identity Over Time",
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - The Importance Of Being a Person", and
… "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - The Coherence Of the Constitution View of Human Persons".
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection", Baker
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and the Natural Order", Baker
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons in Metaphysical Perspective", Baker
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - The Ontological Status of Persons", Baker
- "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - When Does a Person Begin?", Baker
- "Bourgeois (Warren) - Persons: What Philosophers Say about You", Bourgeois
- "Brennan (Andrew) - Concepts of a Person", Brennan
- "Burge (Tyler) - Memory and Persons", Burge
- "Carrithers (Michael), Collins (Steven) & Lukes (Steven) - The Category of the Person: Anthropology, philosophy, history", Carrithers
- "DeGrazia (David) - Are we essentially persons? Olson, Baker, and a reply", DeGrazia
- "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood", Dennett
- "Forrester (Mary) - Persons, Animals, and Fetuses: An Essay in Practical Ethics", Forrester
- "Frankfurt (Harry) - Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person", Frankfurt
- "Garrett (Brian) - Persons", Garrett
- "Goodenough (Jerry) - The Achievement of Personhood", Goodenough
- "Hudson (Hud) - A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person", Hudson
- "Hudson (Hud) - Temporal Parts and Moral Personhood", Hudson
- "Ishiguro (Hide) - The Primitiveness of the Concept of a Person", Ishiguro
- "JCS - Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 14, Issue 05-06 (2007)", JCS “Dimensions of Personhood”
- "Leiber (Justin) - Can Animals and Machines Be Persons? : A Dialogue", Leiber
- "Lowe (E.J.) - Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind", Lowe
- "Margolis (Joseph) - Persons: Notes on Their Nature, Identity and Rationality", Margolis
- "Margolis (Joseph) - Persons and Minds: Prospects of Nonreductive Materialism", Margolis
- "McCall (Catherine) - Concepts of Person: An Analysis of Concepts of Person, Self and Human Being", McCall
- "McInerney (Peter K.) - Conceptions of Persons and Persons through Time", McInerney
- "Midgley (Mary) - Persons and Non-Persons", Midgley
- "Mitchell (Robert) - Humans, Nonhumans and Personhood", Mitchell
- "Olson (Eric) - The Nature of People", Olson
- "Parfit (Derek) - Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons", Parfit
- "Parfit (Derek) - Reasons and Persons", Parfit
- "Park (Desiree) - Persons", Park
- "Perry (John) - Personal Identity and the Concept of a Person", Perry
- "Petrus (Klaus), Ed. - On Human Persons", Petrus
- "Plantinga (Alvin) - Things and Persons", Plantinga
- "Pollock (John L.) - How to Build a Person: The Physical Basis of Mentality", Pollock
- "Pollock (John L.) - How to Build a Person: A Prolegomenon", Pollock
- "Poole (Ross) - On Being a Person", Poole
- "Puccetti (Roland) - Persons: A Study of Possible Moral Agents in the Universe", Puccetti
- "Russell (Robert John), Murphy (Nancey), Meyering (Theo C.), Arbib (Michael A.) - Neuroscience and the Person", Russell etc
- "Sapontzis (Steve F.) - A Critique of Personhood", Sapontzis
- "Selling (Joseph) - The Human Person", Selling
- "Shoemaker (David) - Personal Identity and Ethics - Introduction", Shoemaker_D
- "Shoemaker (Sydney) - Persons and Personal Identity", Shoemaker_S
- "Sprague (Elmer) - Persons and Their Minds: A Philosophical Investigation", Sprague
- "Stone (Jim) - Why there are still no people", Stone
- "Strawson (Peter) - Persons", Strawson
- "Strawson (Peter) - Persons", Strawson
- "Taylor (Richard), Chisholm (Roderick) - Chisholm's Idea of a Person", Taylor
- "Teichman (Jenny) - The Definition of Person", Teichman
- "Trendelenberg (Adolf) - A Contribution to the History of the Word Person", Trendelenberg
- "Van Inwagen (Peter) & Zimmerman (Dean) - Persons: Human and Divine", Van Inwagen
- "Wilkerson (T.E.) - Minds, Brains and People", Wilkerson
- "Wilkes (Kathleen) - Real People: Preface", Wilkes
- "Wilson (Edgar) - Two Incompatible Models of Persons", Wilson
- Further items to be supplied (hopefully not many!).
- Many aspects of these papers will need to be either ignored or reserved for other chapters.
- The motivation for these works is as follows:-
Links to Notes
- The primary Notes are:-
- No doubt there are others:-
Final Remarks
- This is work-in-progress11.
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 6:
- See the section on Research Methodology for what is to be done with these.
- The author’s surname is repeated in the text to make it easier for me to see what’s going on in the encoded text I work on.
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