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42The Dualist Project and the Remote-Control ObjectionRoczniki Filozoficzne 69 (1): 89-101. 2021.Substance dualism says that all thinking beings are immaterial. This sits awkwardly with the fact that thinking requires an intact brain. Many dualists say that bodily activity is causally necessary for thinking. But if a material thing can cause thinking, why can’t it think? No argument for dualism, however convincing, answers this question, leaving dualists with more to explain than their opponents.
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668Against Person EssentialismMind 129 (515): 715-735. 2020.It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with d…Read more
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11Warum wir Tiere sindIn Alfred North Whitehead (ed.), La Science Et le Monde Moderne, De Gruyter. pp. 11-22. 2006.
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177Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, MICHAEL TYE. Cambridge, MA, and London, UKPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2): 500-503. 2006.There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.
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13A Compound of Two SubstancesIn Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons, Cornell University Press. 2001.
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101What Does it Mean to Say That We Are Animals?Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12): 84-107. 2015.The view that we are animals -- animalism -- is often misunderstood. It is typically stated in unhelpful or misleading ways. Debates over animalism are often unclear about what question it purports to answer, and what the alternative answers are. The paper tries to state clearly what animalism says and does not say. This enables us to distinguish different versions of animalism.
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78Swinburne’s Brain TransplantsPhilosophia Christi 20 (1): 21-29. 2018.Richard Swinburne argues that if my cerebral hemispheres were each transplanted into a different head, what would happen to me is not determined by my material parts, and I must therefore have an immaterial part. The paper argues that this argument relies on modal claims that Swinburne has not established. And the means he proposes for establishing such claims cannot succeed.
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48Interview by Simon CushingJournal of Cognition and Neuroethics (Philosophical Profiles). 2016.Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Eric Olson on 1 July 2016.
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173Narrative and persistenceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3): 419-434. 2019.ABSTRACTMany philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accoun…Read more
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12Lowe's Defence of ConstitutionalismPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (210): 92-95. 2003.Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I argue …Read more
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36Material Coincidence and the Indiscernibility ProblemPhilosophical Quarterly 51 (204): 337-355. 2001.It is often said that the same particles can simultaneously make up two or more material objects that differ in kind and in their mental, biological and other qualitative properties. Others wonder how objects made of the same parts in the same arrangement and surroundings could differ in these ways. I clarify this worry and show that attempts to dismiss or solve it miss its point. At most one can argue that it is a problem we can live with.
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301Was I Ever a Fetus?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1): 95-110. 1997.The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career. has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus---contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what does ordinarily happen to a hum…Read more
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14Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self, by John Perry (review)European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 434-437. 2006.
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1Human Persons, Human Organisms: Why Psychology is Not Relevant to Personal IdentityDissertation, Syracuse University. 1993.Beginning with Locke, most philosophers writing on personal identity have claimed that some sort of psychological continuity is necessary for a person to persist from one time to another. I argue that this "psychological approach" to personal identity faces ontological difficulties that many of its proponents have not appreciated. In its place I advocate a "biological approach" to personal identity: you and I are human organisms, and our persistence, like that of other organisms, consists in nar…Read more
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873Life After Death and the Devastation of the GraveIn Keith Augustine & Michael Martin (eds.), The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 409-423. 2015.This paper—written for nonspecialist readers—asks whether life after death is in any sense possible given the apparent fact that after we die our remains decay to the point where only randomly scattered atoms remain. The paper argues that this is possible only if our remains are not in fact dispersed in this way, and discusses how that might be the case. 1. Life After Death -- 2. Total Destruction -- 3. The Soul -- 4. Body-Snatching -- 5. Radical Resurrection -- 6. Irreversibility -- 7. Atomic R…Read more
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374The Zombies Among UsNoûs 52 (1): 216-226. 2016.Philosophers disagree about whether there could be “zombies”: beings physically identical to normal human people but lacking consciousness. Establishing their possibility would refute physicalism. But it is seldom noted that the popular “constitution view” of human people implies that our bodies actually are zombies. This would contradict several widely held views in the philosophy of mind.
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386Temporal parts and timeless parthoodNoûs 40 (4). 2006.What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: tempora…Read more
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143Human atomsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (3): 396-406. 1998.In this paper I shall explore a novel alternative to these familiar views. In his recent book Sub ects of Ex erience, E. J. Lowe argues, as many others have done before, that you and I are not animals. It follows from this, he says, that we must be simple substances without parts. That may sound like Cartesian dualism. But Lowe is no Cartesian. He argues from premises that many present-day materialists accept. And he claims that our being mereologically simple is consistent with our having such …Read more
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1018The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without PsychologyOxford University Press. 1997.Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson reject…Read more
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104BrainsIn Eric T. Olson (ed.), What are we?, Oxford University Press. 2007.This chapter considers the view that we are literally brains. It argues that the view is best supported by the claim that brains are the primary subjects of mental properties, giving a “thinking‐brain problem” analogous to the thinking‐animal problem that supports animalism. The brain view is shown to have implausible consequences about our identity through time, and to presuppose that something is a part of a thinking being if and only if it is directly involved in that being's mental processes…Read more
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43Review of Hud Hudson, A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (4). 2002.
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36Review: Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (eds): Persons: Human and Divine (review)Mind 117 (465): 234-237. 2008.
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387Why I have no handsTheoria 61 (2): 182-197. 1995.Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for 'person'.
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365Was I ever a fetus?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1): 95-110. 1997.The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what does ordinarily happen to a huma…Read more
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59Identity, Quantification, and NumberIn T. Tahko (ed.), Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 66-82. 2012.E. J. Lowe and others argue that there can be 'uncountable' things admitting of no numerical description. This implies that there can be something without there being at least one such thing, and that things can be identical without being one or nonidentical without being two. The clearest putative example of uncountable things is portions of homogeneous stuff or 'gunk'. The paper argues that there is a number of portions of gunk if there is any gunk at all, and that the possibility of uncountab…Read more
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56The Paradox of IncreaseThe Monist 89 (3): 390-417. 2006.The paradox of increase in an ancient argument purporting to show that nothing can grow by acquiring new parts. If it is sound, similar reasoning leads to the more general conclusion that nothing can ever change its parts. After discussing the implicationsof this principle, the paper lays out the paradox in a way that reveals the premises that figure in it. It emerges that the paradox has no easy solution, and can be resisted only by taking on one of five serious metaphysical commitments.
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70The Nature of PeopleIn Steven Luper (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death, Cambridge University Press. pp. 30-46. 2014.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |