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113RepliesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3): 623-635. 2002.Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.
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16Brief Reply to Rosenkrantz's Comments on my “The Ontological Status of Persons”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 394-396. 2002.Chisholm held that persons are essentially persons. The Constitution View affords a non-Chisholmian way to defend the thesis that persons are essentially persons. The Constitution View shows how persons are constituted by---but not identical to---human animals. On the Constitution View, being a person determines a person’s persistence conditions. On the Animalist View, being an animal determines a person’s persistence conditions.Things of kind K have ontological significance if their persistence…Read more
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354Naturalism and the first-person perspectiveIn Georg Gasser (ed.), How Successful is Naturalism? Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, Ontos Verlag. pp. 203-226. 2007.The first-person perspective is a challenge to naturalism. Naturalistic theories are relentlessly third-personal. The first-person perspective is, well, first-personal; it is the perspective from which one thinks of oneself as oneself* without the aid of any third-person name, description, demonstrative or other referential device. The exercise of the capacity to think of oneself in this first-personal way is the necessary condition of all our self-knowledge, indeed of all our self-consciousness…Read more
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38. Instrumentalism: Back from the Brink?In Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton University Press. pp. 149-166. 1987.
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76. How High the Stakes?In Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton University Press. pp. 113-133. 1987.
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36The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism (review)Analysis 69 (2): 370-372. 2009.Many materialist ontologies characterize the existence of everyday, middle-sized objects as reducible to collections or mereological sums of smaller, more fundamental particle constituents. Baker would have it otherwise and has set out a defence of her Constitution View of ontology that takes everyday objects to be irreducibly real and of a vast array of kinds.Motivating an interest in the metaphysics of everyday objects is not obviously straightforward when contemporary metaphysics is filled wi…Read more
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42L7 The first-person perspective and its relation to natural scienceIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. 2013.
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140“Tätigsein und die Erste-Person-Perspektive” (Agency and the first-person perspective)In Bruno Niederbacher & Edmund Runggaldier (eds.), Was Sind Menschliche Personen?: Ein Akttheoretischer Zugang, Onto Verlag. 2008.It is no news that you and I are agents as well as persons. Agency and personhood are surely connected, but it is not obvious just how they are connected. I believe that being a person and being an agent are intimately linked by what I call a ‘first-person perspective’: All persons and all agents have first-person perspectives. Even so, the connection between personhood and agency is not altogether straightforward. There are different kinds of agents, and there are different kinds of first-perso…Read more
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308Persons and the metaphysics of resurrectionReligious Studies 43 (3): 333-348. 2007.Theories of the human person differ greatly in their ability to underwrite a metaphysics of resurrection. This paper compares and contrasts a number of such views in light of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. In a Christian framework, resurrection requires that the same person who exists on earth also exists in an afterlife, that a postmortem person be embodied, and that the existence of a postmortem person is brought about by a miracle. According to my view of persons (the Constitution Vi…Read more
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451When does a person begin?Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2): 25-48. 2005.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…Read more
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75On being one's own personIn M. Sie, Marc Slors & B. van den Brink (eds.), Reasons of One's Own, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2004.
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Saint Mary's College of CaliforniaRegular Faculty
Moraga, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |