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  1. Constitutionalism, Cheap Indeterminism and the Grounding Problem.Marta Campdelacreu - 2018 - Metaphysica 19 (1):19-37.
    Thomas Sattig has argued recently that constitutionalism renders determinism about the actual world false, just in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary middle-sized material objects. However, it seems that, if determinism about the actual world is false, this should be so for reasons of physics rather than in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary objects. This is the problem of cheap indeterminism. Sattig also claims, however, that constitutionalists can solve this problem if they abandon an attractive and promising solution to (...)
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  • Mental Excess and the Constitution View of Persons.Robert Francescotti - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (2):211-243.
    Constitution theorists have argued that due to a difference in persistence conditions, persons are not identical with the animals or the bodies that constitute them. A popular line of objection to the view that persons are not identical with the animals/bodies that constitute them is that the view commits one to undesirable overpopulation, with too many minds and too many thinkers. Constitution theorists are well aware of these overpopulation concerns and have gone a long way toward answering them. However, there (...)
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  • Interactive, Inclusive Substance Dualism.Jeff Engelhardt - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (3):1149-1165.
    This paper argues that a certain kind of substance dualism can adopt the ‘Compatibilist’ solution to the problem of causal exclusion. After sketching a non-Cartesian substance dualism akin to E.J. Lowe’s account, 5-23, 2006, 2008) and considering its shortcomings with respect to mental causation in section one, section two outlines an alternative account of mental causation and argues that this account solves the exclusion problem. Finally, section three considers a challenge to the proposed solution. With the exception of Lowe’s efforts, (...)
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  • Personhood and Natural Kinds: Why Cognitive Status Need Not Affect Moral Status.Joseph Vukov - 2017 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (3):261-277.
    Lockean accounts of personhood propose that an individual is a person just in case that individual is characterized by some advanced cognitive capacity. On these accounts, human beings with severe cognitive impairment are not persons. Some accept this result—I do not. In this paper, I therefore advance and defend an account of personhood that secures personhood for human beings who are cognitively impaired. On the account for which I argue, an individual is a person just in case that individual belongs (...)
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  • What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them.Brian Epstein - 2017 - Synthese 196 (12):4899-4932.
    This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...)
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  • Big Data and Changing Concepts of the Human.Carrie Figdor - 2019 - European Review 27 (3):328-340.
    Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to nonhuman domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with nonhumans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.
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  • The Logical Space of Social Trinitarianism.Matthew Davidson - 2016 - Faith and Philosophy 33 (3):333-357.
    I try to lay bare some of the conceptual space in which one may be a Social Trinitarian. I organize the paper around answers to five questions. These are: (1) How do the three Persons of the Trinity relate to the Godhead? (2) How many divine beings or gods are there? (3) How many distinct centers of consciousness are there in the Godhead? (4) How many omnicompetent beings are there? (5) How are the Persons of the Trinity individuated? I try (...)
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  • Mereological Nihilism and Personal Ontology.Andrew Brenner - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268).
    Mereological nihilists hold that composition never occurs, so that nothing is ever a proper part of anything else. Substance dualists generally hold that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper, I argue that every popular objection to substance dualism has a parallel objection to composition. This thesis has some interesting implications. First, many of those who reject composition, but accept substance dualism, or who reject substance dualism and accept composition, have some explaining to do. Secondly, one (...)
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  • Our animal interests.Andrew M. Bailey - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (9):2315-2328.
    Animalism is at once a bold metaphysical theory and a pedestrian biological observation. For according to animalists, human persons are organisms; we are members of a certain biological species. In this article, I introduce some heretofore unnoticed data concerning the interlocking interests of human persons and human organisms. I then show that the data support animalism. The result is a novel and powerful argument for animalism. Bold or pedestrian, animalism is true.
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  • The metaphysics of mortals: death, immortality, and personal time.Cody Gilmore - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (12):3271-3299.
    Personal time, as opposed to external time, has a certain role to play in the correct account of death and immortality. But saying exactly what that role is, and what role remains for external time, is not straightforward. I formulate and defend accounts of death and immortality that specify these roles precisely.
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  • Foundational Grounding and the Argument from Contingency.Kenneth L. Pearce - 2017 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 8.
    The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In response to this difficulty, this chapter defends three theses. First, it argues that, if the (...)
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  • Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents.Gunnar Björnsson & Kendy Hess - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):273–298.
    Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “ corporate ” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what (...)
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  • II—Exclusive Individuals.Bill Brewer - 2015 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 89 (1):125-142.
    I agree with a great deal in Helen Steward's paper. I am especially sympathetic to her suggestion that we gain metaphysical illumination by considering various ways in which we arrive at ideas of certain kinds of individuals by abstraction from those of more basic kinds. My aim is to pursue that suggestion by exploring the proposal that a grounding node in this form of abstraction may be characterized by Exclusivity in spatial location. Steward claims that we arrive at our ideas (...)
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  • The Right Stuff.Ned Markosian - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4):665-687.
    This paper argues for including stuff in one's ontology. The distinction between things and stuff is first clarified, and then three different ontologies of the physical universe are spelled out: a pure thing ontology, a pure stuff ontology, and a mixed ontology of both things and stuff. Eleven different reasons for including stuff in one's ontology are given. Then five objections to positing stuff are considered and rejected.
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  • The Supervenience Solution to the Too-Many-Thinkers Problem.C. S. Sutton - 2014 - Philosophical Quarterly 64 (257):619-639.
    Persons think. Bodies, time-slices of persons, and brains might also think. They have the necessary neural equipment. Thus, there seems to be more than one thinker in your chair. Critics assert that this is too many thinkers and that we should reject ontologies that allow more than one thinker in your chair. I argue that cases of multiple thinkers are innocuous and that there is not too much thinking. Rather, the thinking shared between, for example, persons and their bodies is (...)
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  • Because They Can: The Basis for the Moral Obligations of (Certain) Collectives.Kendy M. Hess - 2014 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1):203-221.
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  • The Priority Principle.Andrew M. Bailey - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1):163-174.
    I introduce and argue for a Priority Principle, according to which we exemplify certain of our mental properties in the primary or non-derivative sense. I then apply this principle to several debates in the metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
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  • (2 other versions)Is My Head a Person?Michael B. Burke - 2003 - In Klaus Petrus (ed.), On Human Persons. Heusenstamm Nr Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. pp. 107-125.
    It is hard to see why the head and other brain-containing parts of a person are not themselves persons, or at least thinking, conscious beings. Some theorists have sought to reconcile us to the existence of thinking person-parts. Others have sought to avoid them but have relied on radical theories at odds with the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. This paper offers a novel, conservative solution, one on which the heads and other brain-containing parts of persons do exist (...)
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  • A Mereology for the Change of Parts.Pierdaniele Giaretta & Giuseppe Spolaore - 2011 - In Majda Trobok, Nenad Miščević & Berislav Žarnić (eds.), Between Logic and Reality: Modeling Inference, Action and Understanding. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. pp. 243--259.
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  • Persoonlijke identiteit en fundamenteel zelfbegrip.Christiane Seidel - 2006 - Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 2.
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  • `Leading a universal life': the systematic relevance of Hegel's social philosophy.Michael Quante & David P. Schweikard - 2009 - History of the Human Sciences 22 (1):58-78.
    This article starts from two observations. The first is that some of the most prominent debates in social and political philosophy over the last few decades have been deeply obscured by the confusion of ontological/methodological and normative questions. And the second is that the renewed interest in Hegel's social philosophy has not yet yielded anything like a widely shared view as to whether it should be banned as a totalitarian or reappraised as a liberal account. The aim of this article (...)
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  • Utility Monsters for the Fission Age.Ray Briggs & Daniel Nolan - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2):392-407.
    One of the standard approaches to the metaphysics of personal identity has some counter-intuitive ethical consequences when combined with maximising consequentialism and a plausible doctrine about aggregation of consequences. This metaphysical doctrine is the so-called ‘multiple occupancy’ approach to puzzles about fission and fusion. It gives rise to a new version of the ‘utility monster’ problem, particularly difficult problems about infinite utility, and a new version of a Parfit-style ‘repugnant conclusion’. While the article focuses on maximising consequentialism for simplicity, the (...)
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  • (1 other version)The End of (Human) Life as We Know It.Christina Van Dyke - 2012 - Modern Schoolman 89 (3-4):243-257.
    Is the being in an irreversible persistent vegetative state as the result of a horrible accident numerically identical to the human person, Lindsay, who existed before the accident? Many proponents of Thomistic metaphysics have argued that Aquinas’s answer to this question must be “yes.” In particular, it seems that Aquinas’s commitment to both Aristotelian hylomorphism and the unity of substantial form (viz., that each body/soul composite possesses one and only one substantial form) entails the position that the human person remains (...)
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  • Early Abortion and Personal Ontology.Eugene Mills - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (1):19-30.
    We are beings endowed with “personal capacities”—the capacity for reason, for a concept of self, perhaps more. Among ontologically salient views about what else we are, I focus on the “Big Three.” According to animalism, we are animals that have psychological properties only contingently. According to psychologistic materialism, we are material beings; according to substance dualism, we are either immaterial beings or composites of immaterial and material ones; but according to both psychologistic materialism and substance dualism, we essentially have some (...)
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  • “Personal identity” minus the persons.Kristie Miller - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (S1):91-109.
    This paper defends a version of strong conventionalism minus the ontological commitments of that view. It defends the claim that strictly speaking there are no persons, whilst explicating how to make sense of talk that is about (or purportedly about) persons, by appealing to features in common to conventionalist accounts of personal identity. This view has the many benefits of conventionalist accounts in being flexible enough to deal with problem cases, whilst also avoiding the various worries associated with the existence (...)
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  • Is unsaying polite?Berislav Žarnić - 2011 - In Majda Trobok, Nenad Miščević & Berislav Žarnić (eds.), Between Logic and Reality: Modeling Inference, Action and Understanding. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. pp. 201--224.
    This paper is divided in five sections. Section 11.1 sketches the history of the distinction between speech act with negative content and negated speech act, and gives a general dynamic interpretation for negated speech act. “Downdate semantics” for AGM contraction is introduced in Section 11.2. Relying on semantically interpreted contraction, Section 11.3 develops the dynamic semantics for constative and directive speech acts, and their external negations. The expressive completeness for the formal variants of natural language utterances, none of which is (...)
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  • What are natural kinds?1.Katherine Hawley & Alexander Bird - 2011 - Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):205-221.
    We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.
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  • The location problem in social ontology.Frank Hindriks - 2013 - Synthese 190 (3):413-437.
    Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members (...)
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  • On the Common Sense Argument for Monism.Tuomas E. Tahko & Donnchadh O'Conaill - 2011 - In Philip Goff (ed.), Spinoza on Monism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 149-166.
    The priority monist holds that the cosmos is the only fundamental object, of which every other concrete object is a dependent part. One major argument against monism goes back to Russell, who claimed that pluralism is favoured by common sense. However, Jonathan Schaffer turns this argument on its head and uses it to defend priority monism. He suggests that common sense holds that the cosmos is a whole, of which ordinary physical objects are arbitrary portions, and that arbitrary portions depend (...)
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  • Mechanisms and explanatory realization relations.Thomas W. Polger - 2010 - Synthese 177 (2):193 - 212.
    My topic is the confluence of two recently active philosophical research programs. One research program concerns the metaphysics of realization. The other research program concerns scientific explanation in terms of mechanisms. In this paper I introduce a distinction between descriptive and explanatory approaches to realization. I then use this distinction to argue that a well-known account of realization, due to Carl Gillett, is incompatible with a well-known account of mechanistic explanation, due to Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver (MDC, (...)
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  • No Pairing Problem.Andrew M. Bailey, Joshua Rasmussen & Luke Van Horn - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (3):349-360.
    Many have thought that there is a problem with causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies. In Physicalism or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim attempts to spell out that problem. Rather than merely posing a question or raising a mystery for defenders of substance dualism to answer or address, he offers a compelling argument for the conclusion that immaterial souls cannot causally interact with material bodies. We offer a reconstruction of that argument that hinges on two premises: Kim’s Dictum (...)
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  • Memory, quasi-memory, and pseudo-quasi-memory.Christopher Buford - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):465 – 478.
    Bishop Butler objected to Locke's theory of personal identity on the grounds that memory presupposes personal identity. Most of those sympathetic with Locke's account have accepted Butler's criticism, and have sought to devise a theory of personal identity in the spirit of Locke's that avoids Butler's circularity objection. John McDowell has argued that even the more recent accounts of personal identity are vulnerable to the kind of objection Butler raised against Locke's own account. I criticize McDowell's stance, drawing on a (...)
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  • Construction area (no hard hat required).Karen Bennett - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (1):79-104.
    A variety of relations widely invoked by philosophers—composition, constitution, realization, micro-basing, emergence, and many others—are species of what I call ‘building relations’. I argue that they are conceptually intertwined, articulate what it takes for a relation to count as a building relation, and argue that—contra appearances—it is an open possibility that these relations are all determinates of a common determinable, or even that there is really only one building relation.
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  • Dualist emergentism Martine. Nida-Rmelin - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Wiley-Blackwell.
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  • Fregean Monism: A Solution to the Puzzle of Material Constitution.Soo Lam Wong - 2020 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 27 (4):504-521.
    The puzzle of material constitution can be expressed in at least two ways. First, how can the constituting object and the constituted object, which are materially and spatially coincident, be regarded as different objects? Second, how can the constituting object and the constituted object, which are qualitatively distinct, be regarded as identical objects? Monists argue that the constituting and constituted objects are identical since they are materially and spatially coincident and the property differences between then are simply differences in description, (...)
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  • The nature and basis of human dignity.L. E. E. Patrick & Robert P. George - 2008 - Ratio Juris 21 (2):173-193.
    Abstract. We argue that all human beings have a special type of dignity which is the basis for (1) the obligation all of us have not to kill them, (2) the obligation to take their well-being into account when we act, and (3) even the obligation to treat them as we would have them treat us, and indeed, that all human beings are equal in fundamental dignity. We give reasons to oppose the position that only some human beings, because of (...)
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  • Non-reductionism and special concern.Jens Johansson - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (4):641 – 657.
    The so-called 'Extreme Claim' asserts that reductionism about personal identity leaves each of us with no reason to be specially concerned about his or her own future. Both advocates and opponents of the Extreme Claim, whether of a reductionist or non-reductionist stripe, accept that similar problems do not arise for non-reductionism. In this paper I challenge this widely held assumption.
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  • Principles of composition and criteria of identity.Katherine Hawley - 2006 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4):481 – 493.
    I argue that, despite van Inwagen’s pessimism about the task, it is worth looking for answers to his General Composition Question. Such answers or ‘principles of composition’ tell us about the relationship between an object and its parts. I compare principles of composition with criteria of identity, arguing that, just as different sorts of thing satisfy different criteria of identity, they may satisfy different principles of composition. Variety in criteria of identity is not taken to reflect ontological variety in the (...)
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  • Defining 'dead' in terms of 'lives' and 'dies'.Cody Gilmore - 2007 - Philosophia 35 (2):219-231.
    What is it for a thing to be dead? Fred Feldman holds, correctly in my view, that a definition of ‘dead’ should leave open both (1) the possibility of things that go directly from being dead to being alive, and (2) the possibility of things that go directly from being alive to being neither alive nor dead, but merely in suspended animation. But if this is right, then surely such a definition should also leave open the possibility of things that (...)
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  • Spatio-temporal coincidence and the grounding problem.Karen Bennett - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 118 (3):339-371.
    A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...)
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  • Persons, animals, and identity.Sydney Shoemaker - 2007 - Synthese 162 (3):313 - 324.
    The paper is concerned with how neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity should respond to the challenge of animalist accounts. Neo-Lockean accounts that hold that persons can change bodies via brain transplants or cerebrum transplants are committed to the prima facie counterintuitive denial that a person is an (biologically individuated) animal. This counterintuitiveness can be defused by holding that a person is biological animal (on neo-Lockean views) if the “is” is the “is” of constitution rather than the “is” of identity, and (...)
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  • Social externalism and first-person authority.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (2):287 - 300.
    Social Externalism is the thesis that many of our thoughts are individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of the thinker’s community. After defending Social Externalism and arguing for its broad application, I turn to the kind of defeasible first-person authority that we have over our own thoughts. Then, I present and refute an argument that uses first-person authority to disprove Social Externalism. Finally, I argue briefly that Social Externalism—far from being incompatible with first-person authority—provides a check on (...)
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  • The overdetermination argument revisited.Agustín Vicente - 2004 - Minds and Machines 14 (3):331-47.
    In this paper I discuss a famous argument for physicalism – which some authors indeed regard as the only argument for it – the overdetermination argument. In fact it is an argument that does not establish that all the entities in the world are physical, but that all those events that enter into causal transactions with the physical world are physical. As mental events seem to cause changes in the physical world, the mind is one of those things that fall (...)
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  • Knowing what? Radical versus conservative enactivism.Daniel D. Hutto - 2005 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4):389-405.
    The binary divide between traditional cognitivist and enactivist paradigms is tied to their respective commitments to understanding cognition as based on knowing that as opposed to knowing how. Using O’Regan’s and No¨e’s landmark sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservative thinking. Although their account is advertised as decidedly ‘skill-based’, on close inspection it shows itself to be riddled with suppositions threatening to reduce it to a rules-and-representations approach. To (...)
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  • The evolving fortunes of eliminative materialism.Paul M. Churchland - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Wiley-Blackwell.
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  • What Happens When the Zygote Divides? On the Metaphysics of Monozygotic Twinning.Jeremy W. Skrzypek - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (4):336-353.
    It is often argued that certain metaphysical complications surrounding the phenomenon of monozygotic twinning force us to conclude that, prior to the point at which twinning is no longer possible, the zygote or early embryo cannot be considered an individual human organism. In this essay, I argue, on the contrary, that there are in fact several ways of making sense of monozygotic twinning that uphold the humanity of the original zygote, but also that there is no easy answer to what (...)
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  • Personal-identity Non-cognitivism.Kristie Miller - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    In this paper I outline and defend a new approach to personal-identity—personal-identity non-cognitivism—and argue that it has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals. On this view utterances of personal-identity sentences express a non-cognitive attitude towards relevant person-stages. The resulting view offers a pleasingly nuanced picture of what we are doing when we utter such sentences.
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  • The Many-Subjects Argument against Physicalism.Brian Cutter - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the (...)
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  • The metaphysics of personhood in Confucian role ethics.Jennifer Wang - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-17.
    Inspired by early Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi, defenders of Confucian role ethics argue that persons are constituted by their social roles and relationships. However, this has the puzzling implication that persons cannot survive changes in social roles and relationships. This paper proposes ways to understand this claim by appealing to the notions of essence, material constitution, and four-dimensionalism. In particular, it will be suggested that role ethicists should distinguish biological humans from persons and should say (...)
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  • Qua-Objects, (Non-)Derivative Properties and the Consistency of Hylomorphism.Marta Campdelacreu & Sergi Oms - 2023 - Metaphysica 24 (2):323-338.
    Imagine a sculptor who molds a lump of clay to create a statue. Hylomorphism claims that the statue and the lump of clay are two different colocated objects that have different forms, even though they share the same matter. Recently, there has been some discussion on the requirements of consistency for hylomorphist theories. In this paper, we focus on an argument presented by Maegan Fairchild, according to which a minimal version of hylomorphism is inconsistent. We argue that the argument is (...)
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