Joshua Tepley

In the final moments of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the main human character – Jake Sully – switches bodies with his blue-skinned avatar. This dramatic ending resolves the movie’s remaining plot conflicts, such as Jake’s desire to regain the use of his legs, his newfound loyalty to the Na’vi people, and his love interest in Neytiri – who is twice his size and breathes an atmosphere poisonous to him. But while this climactic event makes for good storytelling, does it make any sense philosophically? Is body switching really possible? More specifically, is body switching really possible as it is portrayed in the movie – without transplanting Jake’s brain or appealing to the existence of immaterial “souls”? This chapter tries to answer this question. After clarifying what it means to “switch bodies” and exploring some dead-end ways of trying to do it, this chapter develops and defends one tenable way of switching bodies that is compatible with the events in the movie. This solution involves articulating a specific theory of human persons (constitutionalism), developing a series of thought experiments, and examining the phenomenon of “split brains,” in which a person with a severed corpus callosum displays two independent streams of consciousness. The chapter ends with an application of this solution to the possibility of secular life after death.

The issue of free will is always lurking in the background of The Good Place, a show deeply concerned with making choices, doing the right thing, and moral responsibility. This chapter offers a careful analysis of the arguments exchanged between the two characters, Eleanor and Michael, in The Good Place. The idea that everything, including human behavior, has a cause of some sort is called “determinism.” More precisely, determinism is the view that everything that happens is caused by other things that happen. Compatibilists use a number of strategies to reconcile free will and determinism, but the simplest, and most common, is to insist that free will isn't the ability to do otherwise. Eleanor offers an argument against free will that can be avoided only by denying determinism. An argument inspired by one of Michael's arguments implies that free will can be denied only by giving up moral responsibility.

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they are what account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to.