•  1
    MERRICKS, T.-Objects and Persons
    Philosophical Books 43 (4): 292-299. 2002.
  •  379
    Sydney Shoemaker argues that the functionalist theory of mind entails a psychological-continuity view of personal identity, as well as providing a defense of that view against a crucial objection. I show that his view has surprising consequences, e.g. that no organism could have mental properties and that a thing's mental properties fail to supervene even weakly on its microstructure and surroundings. I then argue that the view founders on "fission" cases and rules out our being material things.…Read more
  •  238
    The Paradox of Increase
    The Monist 89 (3): 390-417. 2006.
    It seems evident that things sometimes get bigger by acquiring new parts. But there is an ancient argument purporting to show that this is impossible: the paradox of increase or growing argument.i Here is a sketch of the paradox. Suppose we have an object, A, and we want to make it bigger by adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part. Imagine, then, that we conjoin B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what A and B are, or what this conj…Read more
  •  34
    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.
  •  146
    The Metaphysical Implications of Conjoined Twinning
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1): 24-40. 2014.
    Conjoined twinning is said to show that the number of human people—the number of us—can differ from the number of human organisms, and hence that we are not organisms. The paper shows that these arguments either assume the point at issue, rely on dubious and undefended assumptions, or add nothing to more familiar arguments for the same conclusion
  •  231
    The Remnant-Person Problem
    In Stephan Blatti Paul F. Snowdon (ed.), Essays on Animalism, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Animalism is the view that you and I are animals. That is, we are animals in the straightforward sense of having the property of being an animal, or in that each of us is identical to an animal-not merely in the derivative sense of having animal bodies, or of being "constituted by" animals. And by 'animal' I mean an organism of the animal kingdom." Sensible though it may appear, animalism is highly contentious. The most common objection is that it conflicts with widespread and deep beliefs about…Read more
  •  72
    Thinking animals and the constitution view
    Field Guide to Philosophy of Mind. 2001.
    The article discusses Lynne Rudder Baker's view in Persons and Bodies and how it relates to animalism.
  •  993
    Personal identity
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2002.
    Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on personal identity in Eastern philosophy, which I am not competent to discuss. Collins 1982 is a g…Read more
  •  868
    Life After Death and the Devastation of the Grave
    In 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
  •  374
    The Zombies Among Us
    Noûs 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.
  •  143
    Human atoms
    Australasian 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
  •  386
    Temporal parts and timeless parthood
    Noûs 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
  •  104
    Brains
    In 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
  •  1016
    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
  •  385
    Why I have no hands
    Theoria 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'.
  •  365
    Was 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
  •  59
    Identity, Quantification, and Number
    In 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
  •  56
    The Paradox of Increase
    The 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.
  •  320
    Dion’s Foot
    Journal of Philosophy 94 (5): 260-265. 1997.
    Suppose a certain man, Dion, has his foot amputated, and lives to tell the tale. That tale involves a well-known metaphysical puzzle, for most of us assume that there was, before the operation, an object made up of all of Dion’s parts except those that overlapped with his foot-- ”all of Dion except for his foot”, we might say, or Dion’s “foot-complement”. Call that object Theon. (Anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as Dion’s undetached foot-complement may imagine that ‘Theon’ is a name …Read more
  •  70
    The Nature of People
    In Steven Luper (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death, Cambridge University Press. pp. 30-46. 2014.
  •  3
    Animalism and the Remnant-Person Problem
    In João Fonseca & Jorge Gonçalves (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on the Self, Peter Lang. pp. 21-40. 2015.
  •  584
    The Bodily Criterion of Personal Identity
    In Fraser MacBride (ed.), Identity and Modality, Clarendon Press. pp. 242. 2006.
    One of the main problems of personal identity is supposed to be how we relate to our bodies. A few philosophers endorse what is called a 'bodily criterion of personal identity': they say that we are our bodies, or at any rate that our identity over time consists in the identity of our bodies. Many more deny this--typically on the grounds that we can imagine ourselves coming apart from our bodies. But both sides agree that the bodily criterion is an important view which anyone thinking about pers…Read more
  •  163
    Personal identity and the radiation argument
    Analysis 61 (1): 38-44. 2001.
    Sydney Shoemaker has argued that, because we can imagine a people who take themselves to survive a 'brain-state-transfer' procedure, cerebrum transplant, or the like, we ought to conclude that we could survive such a thing. I claim that the argument faces two objections, and can be defended only by depriving it any real interest
  •  70
    Lowe's defence of constitutionalism
    Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210). 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
  •  383
    What are we?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5-6): 37-55. 2007.
    This paper is about the neglected question of what sort of things we are metaphysically speaking. It is different from the mind-body problem and from familiar questions of personal identity. After explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, the paper tries to show how difficult it is to give a satisfying answer
  •  137
    Immanent Causation and Life After Death
    In G. Gasser (ed.), Personal Identity and Resurrection, Ashgate. pp. 51-66. 2010.
    The paper concerns the metaphysical possibility of life after death. It argues that the existence of a psychological duplicate is insufficient for resurrection, even if psychological continuity suffices for personal identity. That is because our persistence requires immanent causation. There are at most three ways of having life after death: if we are immaterial souls; if we are snatched bodily from our deathbeds; or if there is immanent causation ‘at a distance’ as Zimmerman proposes--but this …Read more
  •  191
    The Person and the Corpse
    In Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman & Jens Johansson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, Oup Usa. pp. 80. 2013.