Lynne Rudder Baker

(1944 - 2017)

I want to raise a question for which I have no definitive answer. The question is how to understand first-personal phenomena—phenomena that that can be discerned only from a first-personal point of view. The question stems from reflection on two claims: First, the claim of scientific naturalism that all phenomena can be described and explained by science; and second, the claim of science that everything within its purview is intersubjectively accessible, and hence that all science is constructed exclusively form the third-personal point of view. Using these two claims as premises, we can construct a simple valid argument, which I’ll label ‘The Master Argument:’.

On September 11, 2001, as everyone knows, the towers of the World Trade Center in New York were attacked. I want to discuss this event in order to motivate a nonreductionist view of the extensions of everyday concepts. Next, I shall set out, and begin to defend, the particular view of nonreductionism that I favor—the Constitution View. Then, I shall consider two venerable metaphysical issues (the nature of vagueness and the mind-independent/mind- dependent distinction) in light of the Constitution View. If the Constitution View is correct, then everyday concepts are a good guide to reality. My aim is to offer a metaphysical theory that acknowledges the genuine reality of what our everyday concepts (as well as our scientific concepts) are concepts of.

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 he 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.

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

Nonphilosophers, if they think of philosophy at all, wonder why people work in metaphysics. After all, metaphysics, as Auden once said of poetry, makes nothing happen.1 Yet some very intelligent people are driven to spend their lives exploring metaphysical theses. Part of what motivates metaphysicians is the appeal of grizzly puzzles (like the paradox of the heap or the puzzle of the ship of Theseus). But the main reason to work in metaphysics, for me at least, is to understand the shared world that we all encounter and interact with. And the shared world that we all encounter includes us self-conscious beings and our experience. The world that we inhabit is unavoidably a temporal world: the signing of the Declaration of Independence is later than the Lisbon earthquake; the Cold War is in the past; your death is in the future. There is no getting away from time.

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.

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’.

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.

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

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.

Commonsense psychological explanations are an integral part of a comprehensive commonsense background that includes almost everything that we deal with everyday— from traffic jams to paychecks to cozy dinners for two. It is the comprehensive commonsense background that I think is not wholesale refutable by science. A good deal of the comprehensive commonsense background itself depends on there being beliefs, desires, intentions and other propositional attitudes. If there never have been propositional attitudes, then there never have been statues or schools or terrorists or Nobel prizes. Since I think it unreasonable to suppose that science will reveal that there never has been a statue, or a school or a terrorist or a Nobel prize, I also think it unreasonable to suppose that science will reveal that nobody has ever had a belief, desire, intention or other propositional attitude.1

In the large recent literature on the nature of human persons, persons are usually studied in isolation from the world in which they live. What persons are most fundamentally, philosophers say, are human animals, or brains, or perhaps souls -- without any consideration of the social and physical environments without which persons would not exist. In this article, I want to compensate for such overly narrow focus. Instead of beginning with the nature of persons cut off from any environment, I shall begin with metaphysical consideration of the world of which persons are a part. I shall then briefly describe my view of persons, according to which persons are material objects like other concrete things in the world, but are unique in their first-person perspectives. Finally, I shall consider some of the special relations that persons, and only persons, have to other things in the world.

We run into instances of material constitution everywhere we turn. Material constitution is the relation that obtains between an octagonal piece of metal and a Stop sign, between strands of DNA molecules and genes, between pieces of paper and dollar bills, between stones and monuments, between lumps of clay and statues, between human persons and their bodies—the list is endless. Although there has been a great deal of controversy recently about the nature of material constitution, I want to enter the fray by setting out and defending an explicit definition of what it is for an object x to constitute an object y at time t.

Many physicalists are committed to an austere dichotomy: either beliefs, desires and intentions are scientifically respectable or attributions of such attitudes are all false. One physicalist, Daniel Dennett, offers a third alternative, which seems to permit a kind of instrumentalism concerning attitudes. I argue that Dennett's attempt to reconcile an instrumentalistic account of attributions of attitudes with a thoroughgoing physicalism founders on unresolvable conflicts between his official theory and his actual treatment of key concepts. As a result, instrumentalism concerning attitudes is exposed as inadequate to be a genuine alternative to the physicalist's dichotomy

Any artefact – a hammer, a telescope, an artificial hip – may malfunction. Conceptually speaking, artefacts have an inherent normative aspect. I argue that the normativity of artefacts should be understood as part of reality, and not just “in our concepts.” I first set out Deflationary Views of artefacts, according to which there are no artefactual properties, just artefactual concepts. According to my contrasting view – the Constitution View – there are artefactual properties that things in the world really have. For example, there is a property of being a telephone per se; we apply our concept telephone to things that have that property. Things that have the property of being a telephone are constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. To be an artefact, an object must have an intended function, among other things. Telephones – in virtue of being the kind of objects that they are – are always subject to malfunction. And malfunctions, when they occur, are just as much part of the world as telephones are. The example of artefacts shows that what is in the world – what really exists – need not be “mind-independent” nor independent of our concepts.

_Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Religion_ features newly commissioned debates on some of the most controversial issues in the field. Is evil evidence against belief in God? Does science discredit religion? Is God’s existence the best explanation of the universe? Is morality based on God’s commands? Is eternal damnation compatible with the Christian concept of God? Features debates focusing on each of twelve of the most controversial issues in the field. Includes essays, replies, and rejoinders especially commissioned for this volume. Contributors include William Alston, Lynne Rudder Baker, Peter Byrne, Richard Gale, William Hasker, Janine Marie Idziak, Michael Martin, Del Ratzsch, William Rowe, John Worrall, Keith Yandell, Dean Zimmerman, and many others.