Marya Schechtman

This article uncovers difficulties with a widely-held account of the kind of agential unity required for autonomous action and offers an alternative account that avoids these difficulties. One influential approach to characterizing agency holds that autonomous action occurs only when an agent is wholeheartedly committed to the motivation on which he or she acts. The basic idea behind this approach is that autonomous action is action that flows from motivations that are truly internal to the agent, and that it is an agent’s wholehearted commitment to a motivation that makes it internal in the relevant sense. Reflection on the diachronic aspects of agency reveals some serious challenges for this approach. These challenges are diagnosed as stemming from a fundamental structural tension between two of its key elements; on the one hand the requirement of absolute wholeheartedness about our commitments, and on the other the claim that questions of agency and autonomy must take as their target the principles, plans, and projects that individual actions represent rather than the actions themselves. The article argues that this tension is unavoidable in the approach as usually defended and outlines a different strategy for characterizing agential unity that does not require wholeheartedness.

Can we understand what makes someone the same person without understanding what it is to be a person? Prereflectively we might not think so, but philosophers often accord these questions separate treatments, with personal-identity theorists claiming the first question and free-will theorists the second. Yet much of what is of interest to a person—the possibility of survival over time, compensation for past hardships, concern for future projects, or moral responsibility—is not obviously intelligible from the perspective of either question alone. Marya Schechtman encourages us to adopt a more unified perspective.

This article examines the narrative approach to self found in philosophy and related disciplines. The strongest versions of the narrative approach hold that both a person's sense of self and a person's life are narrative in structure, and this is called the hermeneutical narrative theory. This article provides a provisional picture of the content of the narrative approach and considers some important objections that have been raised to the narrative approach. It defends the view that the self constitutes itself in narrative and argues for something less than the hermeneutical view insofar as the narrative is less agency-oriented and without an overarching thematic unity.

Persons have a curious dual nature. On the one hand, they are subjects, whose actions must be explained in terms of beliefs, desires, plans, and goals. At the same time, however, they also are physical objects, whose actions must be explicable in terms of physical laws. So far no satisfying account of this duality has been offered. Both Cartesian dualism and the modern materialist alternatives (reductionist and antireductionist) have failed to capture the full range of our experience of persons. I argue that an exciting new approach to this difficulty can be found by considering developments in clinical psychology. The clinical debate between those endorsing biological models of mental illness and those endorsing psychodynamic models mirrors broader debates in the philosophy of mind. The possible resolution of this debate through the development of integrated psychobiological models suggests a promising way to reconcile the dual nature of persons in a far more appealing way than any yet proposed.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has in some cases been associated with significant psychological effects and/or personality change. These effects occur sometimes as acute changes experienced intraoperatively or during the initial setting of the stimulator and sometimes as longer term progressive changes in the months following surgery. Sometimes they are the intended outcome of treatment, and in other cases they are an unintended side-effect. In all of these circumstances some patients and caregivers have described the psychological effects of DBS as frightening or disconcerting. I trace the source of these negative reactions to the fear that stimulation-related psychological and personality changes represent a threat to personal identity and agency. This issue has implications both for philosophical theories of personal identity and agency and for clinical concerns. A narrative account of personal identity is developed to illuminate the nature of the threat to identity and agency DBS potentially poses, and to suggest steps that might be taken to mitigate and avoid these threats.

Everyone loves a good story. But does everyone live a good story? It has frequently been asserted by philosophers, psychologists and others interested in understanding the distinctive nature of human existence that our lives do, or should, take a narrative form. Over the last few decades there has been a steady and growing focus on this narrative approach within philosophical discussions of personal identity, resulting in a wide range of narrative identity theories. While the narrative approach has shown great promise as a tool for addressing longstanding and intractable problems of personal identity, it has also given rise to much suspicion. Opponents of this approach charge it with overstating or distorting the structure of actual lives.

Steven Luper offers richly-textured arguments against the Embodied Part View developed by Jeff McMahan and offered as an answer to the “too many thinkers” problem. One of the major objections he raises is connected to McMahan's claim that the mind, and so the person, is to be identified with the part of the brain in which consciousness is directly realized. This view has the implausible consequence, Luper argues, that persons do not and cannot think or reason or have desires or interests. While this is indeed a worrisome consequence, it is not clear that McMahan is committed to the understanding of what constitutes “the part of the brain in which consciousness is directly realized” that Luper attributes to him. Making reference to McMahan's Theory of Time-Relative Interests, I develop an alternate way of reading this phrase, one which avoids the difficulties Luper raises. I acknowledge that my understanding yields a view that, while formally consistent, is unattractive in a variety of ways. I suggest, however, that this should not be taken as a reason to favor animalism, since animalism has its own difficulties, which are not entirely unlike those faced by the Embodied Part View.

It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the mind is located in the brain. Although there have been some challenges to this view, it has remained mainstream outside of a few specialized discussions, and plays a prominent role in a wide variety of philosophical arguments. It is further assumed that the source of this view is empirical. I argue it is not. Empirical discoveries show conclusively that the brain is the central organ of mental life, but do not show that it is the mind's location . The data are just as compatible with a view where mentality is a human capacity on the model of circulation or respiration, with the brain playing the same kind of role as the heart or lungs. The standard conception of the brain as the locus of mind stems, I claim, from the imposition of a Cartesian conception of the self on a materialist ontology. Recognizing that the empirical data do not justify such a move casts doubt on the foundations of a number of philosophical discussions and raises new questions about the nature of the psychological subject.

Traditionally, it has been assumed that metaphysical and practical questions about personhood and personal identity are inherently linked. Neo-Lockean views that draw such a link have been problematic, leading to an opposing view that metaphysical and ethical questions about persons should be sharply distinguished. This paper argues that consideration of this issue suffers from an overly narrow conception of the practical concerns associated with persons that focuses on higher-order capacities and fails to appreciate basic practical concerns more directly connected to our animality. A more inclusive alternative is proposed