E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

In the Second Meditation, Descartes famously asks at one point, ‘But what then am I?’ – to which his immediate answer is ‘A thing that thinks.’ It is this question, or rather the plural version of it, that Eric Olson examines in this excellent book. He thinks that it is – today, at least – a rather neglected question. He points out that it is wrong to confuse the question with the much more frequently examined question of what personal identity consists in. In fact, he thinks that possible answers to the two questions, even if not entirely independent of one other, constrain each other only to a rather limited extent. It is important to appreciate that Olson is not inquiring into what persons in general are, but only into what we human persons are. Olson explores all the major, and some of the less well-known, answers that have been offered to this question. He begins with the answer that he himself has defended in an earlier book, The Human Animal – the answer that we are human animals, that is, biological organisms of a certain kind. Indeed, Olson is, along with Peter van Inwagen, one of the best known ‘animalists’ – although he admits to being a little more tentative in his endorsement of this position now, for reasons that we shall come to later. The other views that he considers are these: that we are entities that are ‘constituted’ by, but not identical with, human animals (the view of Lynne Rudder …

This paper challenges David Chalmers' proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the `easy' ones and the `hard' one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential `qualia' resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby neglecting a vitally important insight of Kant. From a Kantian perspective, our capacity for conceptual thought is so inextricably bound up with our capacity for phenomenal consciousness that it is an illusion to imagine that there are any `easy' problems of consciousness, resolvable within the computational or neural paradigms

I favour an analysis of selfhood which ties it to the possession of certain kinds of first-person knowledge, in particular de re knowledge of the identity of one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. My defence of this analysis will lead me to explore the nature of demonstrative reference to one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. Such reference is typically ‘direct’, in contrast to demonstrative reference to all physical objects, apart from those that are parts of one's own body in which one can localize sensations or which are directly subject to one's will. My conclusion will be that the semantic distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ demonstrative reference helps to delineate the metaphysical boundary between oneself and the rest of the world. But I do not contend that one is to be identified with one's own body: indeed, I shall try to show that one can know a priori that no such identity can obtain.

Substantial change occurs when a persisting object of some kind either begins or ceases to exist. Typically, this happens when one or more persisting objects of another kind or kinds are subjected to appropriate varieties of qualitative or relational change, as when the particles composing a lump of bronze are rearranged so as to create a statue. However, such transformations also seem to result, very often, in cases of spatiotemporal coincidence, in which two numerically distinct objects of different kinds exist in exactly the same place at the same time, such as a statue and a lump of bronze. Various attempts to resist this way of describing the results of such transformations are examined and found wanting and objections to the possibility of cases of spatiotemporal coincidence are rebutted

Construing miracles as \textquotedblleft{}violations,\textquotedblright I argue that a law of nature must specify some kind of possibility. But we must have here a sense of possibility for which the ancient rule of logic---ab esse ad posse valet consequentia---does not hold. We already have one example associated with the concept of statute law, a law which specifies what is legally possible but which is not destroyed by a violation. If laws of nature are construed as specifying some analogous sense of what is naturally possible, then they need not be invalidated by a (rare) violation, and Humean miracles remain a genuine possibility.

Metaphysical realism is the view that most of the objects that populate the world exist independently of our thought and have their natures independently of how, if at all, we conceive of them. It is committed, in my opinion, to a robust form of essentialism. Many modern forms of anti-realism have their roots in a form of conceptualism, according to which all truths about essence knowable by us are ultimately grounded in our concepts, rather than in things 'in themselves'. My aim is to show that conceptualist anti-realism is an incoherent doctrine and how we can support metaphysical realism and robust essentialism, while still properly acknowledging the cognitive role of concepts in mediating our grasp of the nature of mind-independent reality.