Lynne Rudder Baker

(1944 - 2017)

The project of explaining intentional phenomena in terms of nonintentional phenomena has become a central task in the philosophy of mind.' Since intentional phenomena like believing, desiring, intending have content essentially, the project is one of showing how semantic properties like content can be reconciled with nonsemantic properties like cause. As Jerry A. Fodor put it, The worry about representation is above all that the semantic (and/or the intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order; for example that the semantic/intentional properties of things will fail to supervene upon their physical properties.2

The Emergent Self is valuable not least because it runs so thoroughly against the grain of contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Hasker defends a kind of substance dualism. In motivating this now-neglected approach, he ranges over a considerable field, discussing, among other things, Kim on supervenience and mental causation, Frankfurt on alternative possibilities, Nagel on panpsychism, Swinburne on the soul, O’Connor on agent causation, van Inwagen on the impossibility of “re-creation,” and Searle on emergent features of systems.

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-person perspectives. On the one hand, all persons are agents, but not all agents are persons; on the other hand, all moral agents are persons, but not all persons are moral agents.

materialist that beliefs are not immaterial soul-states, I think that the conception of beliefs as brain states is badly misguided. I hope to show that "beliefs are brain states or soul states" is a false dichotomy. I am using the phrase 'beliefs as brain states' to cover several familiar theses: the token-identity thesis, according to which beliefs are identical to brain-state tokens; nonreductive materialism, according to which beliefs are constituted by brain states (as pebbles are constituted by..

After an undergraduate degree with a major in mathematics, I turned to philosophy—in part because philosophy had all the interest of math (and logic) plus an indefinitely wide range of subject matter. I began philosophy at an intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of science. My dissertation, Ontological and Linguistic Aspects of Temporal Becoming, was on the philosophy of time. A convinced physicalist, I defended the idea that past, present and future (the A-series) are merely “mind-dependent.” I spent a year as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, working mainly with Adolf Grünbaum, who was very generous to me with his time. Other members of the philosophical community in Pittsburgh suggested that there was no philosophical interest in nowness; the word ‘now’ exhausted whatever there was of real interest concerning the status of the present. I therefore turned my attention from the status of the present (nowness) to the word ‘now’.

Bransen takes the first question to pose “the problem of man’s uniqueness,” and his ultimate aim is to dissolve that problem. His method of dissolving it is by way of a detailed answer to the second question, which is the most fundamental. I want to show that Bransen’s answer to the second question actually provides an answer to each of the other questions, and that instead of dissolving the problem of man’s uniqueness (posed by question #1), what he offers is really a straightforward solution—albeit a partly normative one. To see this, we must look beyond Bransen’s answer to the metaphysical presuppositions on which, I believe, it rests.

The aim of this article is to show that human persons belong, ontologically, in social ontology. After setting out my views on ontology, I turn to persons and argue that they have first-person perspectives in two stages (rudimentary and robust) essentially. Then I argue that the robust stage of the first-person persective is social, in that it requires a language, and languages require linguistic communities. Then I extend the argument to cover the rudimentary stage of the first-person perspective as well. I conclude by enumerating ways in which human persons differ from nonhuman animals.

With all the attention given to the study of consciousness recently, the topic of self-consciousness has been relatively neglected. “It is of course [phenomenal] consciousness rather than...self-conscious that has seemed such a scientific mystery,” a prominent philosopher comments.1 Phenomenal consciousness concerns the aspect of a state that feels a certain way: roses smell like this; garlic tastes like that; middle C sounds like this, and so on. Although phenomenal consciousness is surely a fruitful area of scientific investigation, I hope to demonstrate here that investigation of selfconsciousness offers its own rewards, ontologically speaking