Lynne Rudder Baker

(1944 - 2017)

Baker rejects naturalistic views that exclude first-person facts. Persons are emergent, constituted entities having first-person perspectives that are ineliminable, first-personal, dispositional, multi-stage properties. Persons appear gradually with FPPs in the rudimentary stage, but are distinguished by the later, robust stage. We possess first-person perspectives essentially and thereby have first-personal persistence conditions. Transtemporal identity is unanalyzable, requiring a variant of the Simple View. All that can be said is that a person exists whenever her FPP is exemplified. The view is “not-so-simple” because it eschews substance dualism.

Mainstream analytic metaphysics is a priori metaphysics. It is hemmed in by basic assumptions that rest on no more than a priori intuitions. Jaegwon Kim's arguments about causation are a paradigm example of sophisticated arguments with little or no justification from the world as we know it. And Peter van Inwagen's arguments about material objects are motivated by a question that, I think, has no nontrivial answer: Under what conditions do some x's compose an object y? The trivial answers are "always" and "never." Any other answer, including van Inwagen's, seems to me to be arbitrary—and again based on a priori intuitions. To cite two more examples that I find egregious: The assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction between what is mind-independent and what is not, and the assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction, among things that are real, between what is fundamental and what is not. A priori intuitions, especially when not shared by philosophers outside a small circle of specially trained people, seem a weak reed on which to hang metaphysical systems.

ABSTRACT In September, 2016, I replied to an earlier draft of Oaklander’s Critique of my view of time for Manuscrito. Now he has published an extremely complex 50-page expanded version. There is no way that a reply in a journal could cover all the topics Oaklander discusses. So, I will stick mainly to my own view to which Oaklander was responding. My reply is in two parts. In the first, directed at Oaklander’s earlier draft, I say what I want to do in philosophy in general, and in the philosophy of time in particular. In the second part, I mention some places where he misunderstands my view.

Eric T. Olson has argued that any view of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity has a consequence that he considers untenable—namely, that I was never an early-term fetus. I have several replies. First, the psychological-continuity view of personal identity does not entail the putative consequence; the appearance to the contrary depends on not distinguishing between de re and de dicto theses. Second, the putative consequence is not untenable anyway; the appearance to the contrary depends on not taking seriously an idea that underlies a plausible view of persons that I call ‘the Constitution View’. Finally, Olson’s own “Biological View of personal identity” has liabilities of its own.

Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self-consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self-consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For example, recently Ned Block commented