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There is no problem of the selfJournal of Consciousness Studies 5 (5-6): 645-657. 1998.Because there is no agreed use of the term ‘self', or characteristic features or even paradigm cases of selves, there is no idea of ‘the self’ to figure in philosophical problems. The term leads to troubles otherwise avoidable; and because legitimate discussions under the heading of ‘self’ are really about other things, it is gratuitous. I propose that we stop speaking of selves.
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43Was sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Kö…Read more
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91What am I? Free will and the nature of personsIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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On Parfit's view that we are not human beingsIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Mind, Self and Person, Cambridge University Press. 2015.
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22The Problem of People and Their MatterTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (2). 2022.If I am a material thing, there would seem to be such an entity as the matter now making me up. In that case the matter and I must be either one thing or two. This creates an awkward dilemma. If we’re one thing, then I have existed for billions of years and I am human only momentarily. But if we’re two, then my matter would seem to be a second person. Dean Zimmerman and others take the repugnance of these alternatives to show that I’m not a material thing, but rather an immaterial one. This pape…Read more
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49Do We Have a Soul? A DebateRoutledge. 2023.Are we made entirely of matter, like sticks and stones? Or do we have a soul—a nonphysical entity—where our mental lives take place? The authors Eric T. Olson and Aaron Segal begin this accessible and wide-ranging debate by looking at the often-overlooked question of whether we appear in ordinary experience to be material things. Olson then argues that the dependence of our mental lives on the condition of our brains—the fact that general anesthesia causes complete unconsciousness, for instance—…Read more
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The passage of timeIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
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16Personal IdentityIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: The Problems of Personal Identity Understanding the Persistence Question Accounts of Our Identity Through Time The Psychological Approach The Fission Problem The Problem of the Thinking Animal The Somatic Approach Conclusion.
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18Personal IdentityIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This chapter first surveys the main questions of personal identity, and then focuses on the one that has received most attention in recent times, namely our persistence through time. There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. The familiar ones include: wh…Read more
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16For AnimalismIn Jonathan J. Loose, Angus John Louis Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.We are material things of a specific sort: animals of the primate species Homo sapiens. This is the view known as animalism. The most common reason for rejecting animalism is that it is has unattractive consequences about what it takes for philosophers to persist through time. If human animals are animals essentially, then our being animals implies that we are animals essentially. If they are animals accidentally, then animalism implies that we are animals only accidentally. Aristotelians say th…Read more
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3Warum wir Tiere sindIn Klaus Petrus (ed.), On Human Persons, Heusenstamm Nr Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. pp. 11-22. 2003.
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30The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 1997.A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.
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Is there a bodily criterion of personal identity?In Fraser MacBride (ed.), Identity and modality, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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1An argument for animalismIn John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.
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Lowe's Non-Cartesian DualismIn Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), E. J. Lowe and Ontology, Routledge. pp. 225-238. 2022.E. J. Lowe’s ‘non-Cartesian dualism’ is the widely held view that we and other thinking things are not organisms, but things materially coinciding with or constituted by them. Lowe added to this the claim that we have no parts. This further claim faces obvious and grave objections. His claim (shared by Baker and others) that we have our physical properties only derivatively may seem to offer an answer to these objections. But it introduces new problems, and appears to reduce Lowe’s view to …Read more
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145What is the problem of biological individualityIn Anne Sophie Meincke & John Dupré (eds.), Biological Individuality: Perspectives from Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Biology, Routledge. pp. 63-85. 2021.One big question in biology is what life is, but another is how life divides into living things. This is the problem of biological individuality. Proposed statements of the problem have been vague and incomplete. And proposed theories of biological individuality are not detailed enough to solve the problem even if they are correct. The root of these troubles is that their authors have not recognized the metaphysical claims presupposed in their statement of the problem. Making these claims e…Read more
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214Partial Twinning and the Boundaries of a PersonBelgrade Philosophical Annual 36 (1): 7-24. 2023.In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-orless normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for ‘animalism’, the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning is no more comfortable for those who t…Read more
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313The Metaphysics of TranshumanismIn Karolina Hübner (ed.), Human: A History, Oxford University Press. pp. 381-403. 2022.Transhumanists want to free us from the constraints imposed by our humanity by means of “uploading”: extracting information from the brain, transferring it to a computer, and using it to create a purely electronic person there. That is supposed to move us from our human bodies to computers. This presupposes that a human being could literally move to a computer by a mere transfer of information. The chapter questions this assumption, then asks whether the procedure might be just as good, as f…Read more
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25Review of van Inwagen and Zimmerman, eds., Persons: Human and Divine (review)Mind 117 234-7. 2008.This book consists of fifteen new essays and an introduction by Zimmerman. Most of the authors are Christian philosophers in the ‘analytic’ tradition, and the book is of particular interest to readers of that sort; but there is nothing here that will interest only Christians. As the title suggests, all the essays have at least something to do with persons as such, and most deal with metaphysical issues. Beyond that they are pretty disparate. Seven papers are on substance dualism or idealism, whi…Read more
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261Self: Personal IdentityIn William P. Banks (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consciousness, Elsevier. pp. 301-312. 2009.Personal identity deals with the many philosophical questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being people. The most frequently discussed is what it takes for a person to persist through time. Many philosophers say that we persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Others say that our persistence is determined by brute physical facts, and psychology is irrelevant. In choosing among these answers we must consider not only what they imply about who is who in particular cases, both …Read more
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41The Dualist Project and the Remote-Control ObjectionRoczniki Filozoficzne 69 (1): 89-101. 2021.Substance dualism says that all thinking beings are immaterial. This sits awkwardly with the fact that thinking requires an intact brain. Many dualists say that bodily activity is causally necessary for thinking. But if a material thing can cause thinking, why can’t it think? No argument for dualism, however convincing, answers this question, leaving dualists with more to explain than their opponents.
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640Against Person EssentialismMind 129 (515): 715-735. 2020.It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with d…Read more
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11Warum wir Tiere sindIn Alfred North Whitehead (ed.), La Science Et le Monde Moderne, De Gruyter. pp. 11-22. 2006.
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172Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity, MICHAEL TYE. Cambridge, MA, and London, UKPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2): 500-503. 2006.There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.
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12A Compound of Two SubstancesIn Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons, Cornell University Press. 2001.
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96What Does it Mean to Say That We Are Animals?Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12): 84-107. 2015.The view that we are animals -- animalism -- is often misunderstood. It is typically stated in unhelpful or misleading ways. Debates over animalism are often unclear about what question it purports to answer, and what the alternative answers are. The paper tries to state clearly what animalism says and does not say. This enables us to distinguish different versions of animalism.
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