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Persons, Animals, and Ourselves

In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: a guide and anthology. New York: Oxford University Press (2004)

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  1. What you are and the evolution of organs, souls and superorganisms: a reply to Blatti.Carl Gillett - 2013 - Analysis 73 (2):271-279.
    Stephan Blatti claims to have a new line of reasoning using evolutionary theory that resolves arguments over our deeper natures in favor of the Animalist position that we are identical to Homo sapiens organisms. Blatti thus raises an important question about which views of what we are can take us to be evolved. However, in this response I show that Blatti’s argument using evolution is based upon a false assumption about contemporary biology. I highlight how a better understanding of evolutionary (...)
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  • Reality deflated and minimalized.L. Reinhardt - 2013 - Analysis 73 (2):279-283.
    A claim for minimalism about ‘real’ on the model of minimalism about ‘true’. The article, in effect, develops J.L. Austin’s remark that with ‘real’, the negative ‘wears the trousers’. The development is then exploited for a proposed elucidation of Plato’s discussion of the fields of knowledge and belief in his Republic. It is proposed that Plato was striving for something whose futility was a leading theme of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
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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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  • A new argument for animalism.Stephan Blatti - 2012 - Analysis 72 (4):685-690.
    The view known as animalism asserts that we are human animals—that each of us is an instance of the Homo sapiens species. The standard argument for this view is known as the thinking animal argument . But this argument has recently come under attack. So, here, a new argument for animalism is introduced. The animal ancestors argument illustrates how the case for animalism can be seen to piggyback on the credibility of evolutionary theory. Two objections are then considered and answered.
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  • Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical study.Shaun Nichols & Michael Bruno - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):293-312.
    Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...)
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  • How to count people.Mark Bajakian - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (2):185 - 204.
    How should we count people who have two cerebral hemispheres that cooperate to support one mental life at the level required for personhood even though each hemisphere can be disconnected from the other and support its "own" divergent mental life at that level? On the standard method of counting people, there is only one person sitting in your chair and thinking your thoughts even if you have two cerebral hemispheres of this kind. Is this method accurate? In this paper, I (...)
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  • Harming as causing harm.Elizabeth Harman - 2009 - In David Wasserman & Melinda Roberts (eds.), Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem. Springer. pp. 137--154.
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  • Moral status and the treatment of dissociative identity disorder.Timothy J. Bayne - 2002 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (1):87-105.
    Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this thepsychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). According to this model, the individual personalities or alters that belong to someone with DID possess those properties that proponents of the psychological approach (...)
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  • Personal-identity Non-cognitivism.Kristie Miller - 2024 - 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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  • I Am Mine: From Phenomenology of Self-Awareness to Metaphysics of Selfhood.Janko Nešić - 2023 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 36 (1):67-85.
    I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, I will argue that a subject is (...)
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  • Can Thought Experiments Solve Problems of Personal Identity?Lukas J. Meier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-23.
    Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...)
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  • Why animalism matters.Andrew M. Bailey, Allison Krile Thornton & Peter van Elswyk - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2929-2942.
    Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...)
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  • I Think; Therefore, I am a Fiction.T. Parent - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge.
    The Cartesian thinking self may seem indisputably real. But if it is real, then so thinking, which would undercut mental fictionalism. Thus, in defense of mental fictionalism, this paper argues for fictionalism about the thinking self. In short form, the argument is: (1) If I exist outside of fiction, then I am identical to (some part of/) this biomass [= my body]. (2) If I die at t, I cease to exist at t. (3) If I die at t, no (...)
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  • Resisting the Remnant-Person Problem.Eric Yang - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (3):389-404.
    Some opponents of animalism have offered a relatively new worry: the remnant-person problem. After presenting the problem, I lay out several responses and show why they are either problematic or come with too many theoretical costs. I then present my own response to the problem, which unlike the other responses, it is one that can be adopted by animalists of any stripe. What I hope to show is that some of the key assumptions of the remnant-person problem can be rejected, (...)
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  • Personal Identity.David Shoemaker & Kevin P. Tobia - 2022 - In Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
    Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.
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  • Strategy for Animalism.Joungbin Lim - 2018 - Axiomathes 28 (4):419-433.
    The central argument for animalism is the thinking animal problem : if you are not an animal, there are two thinkers within the region you occupy, i.e., you and your animal body. This is absurd. So you are an animal. The main objection to this argument is the thinking brain problem : animalism faces a problem that is structurally analogous to TAP. Specifically, if animalism is true, you and your brain both think. This is absurd. So animalism is false. The (...)
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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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  • Persons Versus Brains: Biological Intelligence in Human Organisms.E. Steinhart - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (1):3-27.
    I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains.
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  • Possible World Semantics and the Complex Mechanism of Reference Fixing.Alik Pelman - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (4):385-396.
    Possible world semantics considers not only what an expression actually refers to but also what it might have referred to in counterfactual circumstances. This has proven exceptionally useful both inside and outside philosophy. The way this is achieved is by using intensions. An intension of an expression is a function that assigns to each possible world the reference of the expression in that world. However, the specific intension of terms has been subject to frequent disputes. How is one to determine (...)
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  • (1 other version)Modals vs. Morals. Blackburn on Conceptual Supervenience. Dohrn - 2012 - GAP 8 Proceedings.
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  • The animal, the corpse, and the remnant-person.Andrea Sauchelli - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (1):205–218.
    I argue that a form of animalism that does not include the belief that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal has a dialectical advantage over other versions of animalism. The main reason for this advantage is that Phase Animalism, the version of animalism described here, has the theoretical resources to provide convincing descriptions of the outcomes of scenarios problematic for other forms of animalism. Although Phase Animalism rejects the claim that ‘human animal’ is a substance-sortal, it is still appealing to those (...)
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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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  • Bodily Thought and the Corpse Problem.Steinvör Thöll Árnadóttir - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 21 (4):575-592.
    : A key consideration in favour of animalism—the thesis that persons like you and me are identical to the animals we walk around with—is that it avoids a too many thinkers problem that arises for non-animalist positions. The problem is that it seems that any person-constituting animal would itself be able to think, but if wherever there is a thinking person there is a thinking animal distinct from it then there are at least two thinkers wherever there is a thinking (...)
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  • Functionalism and thinking animals.Steinvör Thöll Árnadóttir - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 147 (3):347 - 354.
    Lockean accounts of personal identity face a problem of too many thinkers arising from their denial that we are identical to our animals and the assumption that our animals can think. Sydney Shoemaker has responded to this problem by arguing that it is a consequence of functionalism that only things with psychological persistence conditions can have mental properties, and thus that animals cannot think. I discuss Shoemaker’s argument and demonstrate two ways in which it fails. Functionalism does not rid the (...)
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  • Self-Experience.Brentyn Ramm - 2017 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (11-12):142-166.
    Hume famously denied that he could experience the self. Most subsequent philosophers have concurred with this finding. I argue that if the subject is to function as a bearer of experience it must (1) lack sensory qualities in itself to be compatible with bearing sensory qualities and (2) be single so that it can unify experience. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where one cannot see one’s own head. I argue that this open space conforms (...)
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  • Animalism versus Lockeanism: Reply to Mackie.Harold W. Noonan - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202):83-90.
    I respond to criticisms by David Mackie of my previous paper on animalism and Lockeanism. I argue that the ‘transplant intuition’, that a person goes where his brain (or cerebrum) goes, is compatible both with animalism and Lockeanism. I give three arguments for this conclusion, two of them developing lines of thought in Parfit's work. However, I accept that animalism and Lockeanism are incompatible, and I go on to consider the difficulties for Lockeanism that this raises. The principal difficulty, concerning (...)
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  • Fetuses, corpses and the psychological approach to personal identity.Robert Francescotti - 2005 - Philosophical Explorations 8 (1):69-81.
    Olson (1997a) tries to refute the Psychological Approach to personal identity with his Fetus Argument, and Mackie (1999) aims to do the same with the Death Argument. With the help of a suggestion made by Baker (1999), the following discussion shows that these arguments fail. In the process of defending the Psychological Approach, it is made clear exactly what one is and is not committed to as a proponent of the theory.
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  • ¿Hemos respondido la pregunta "¿Puede pensar una máquina?"?Gonzalez Rodrigo - 2019 - In Discusiones Fundamentales en Filosofía de la Mente: Voces Locales. Valparaíso: Universidad de Valparaíso. pp. 71-95.
    Este trabajo examina si la pregunta “¿puede pensar una máquina?” ha sido respondida de manera satisfactoria. La primera sección, justamente, examina el dictum cartesiano según el cual una máquina no puede pensar en principio. La segunda trata sobre una rebelión en contra de Descartes, encabezada por Babbage. A su vez, la tercera describe una segunda rebelión encabezada por Turing. En ambas se examina, primero el lenguaje mentalista/instrumentalista para describir a una máquina programada y segundo, el reemplazo de la pregunta por (...)
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  • Extended mind, functionalism and personal identity.Miljana Milojevic - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2143-2170.
    In this paper, I address one recent objection to Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s functionalist argument for the extended mind thesis. This objection is posed by Kengo Miyazono, who claims that they unjustifiably identify the original cognitive subject with the hybrid one in order to reach their conclusion about the mind extension. His attack consists of three steps: distinguishing hybrid from traditional cognitive subjects based on the systems reply originally directed at Searle’s Chinese room argument; pointing out that the conclusion (...)
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  • Is Romeo dead? On the persistence of organisms.Rina Tzinman - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):4081-4105.
    According to a prominent view of organism persistence, organisms cease to exist at death. According to a rival view, organisms can continue to exist as dead organisms. Most of the arguments in favor of the latter view rely on linguistic and common sense intuitions. I propose a new argument for somaticism by appealing to two other sources that have thus far not figured in the debate: the concept of naturalness, and biological descriptions of organisms, in particular in ethology and ecology. (...)
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  • Hylemorphic Animalism and the Incarnational Problem of Identity.Andrew Jaeger - 2017 - Journal of Analytic Theology 5:145-162.
    In this paper, I argue that adherents of Patrick Toner’s hylemorphic animalism who also assent to orthodox Christology and a thesis about the necessity of identity must reject a prima facie plausible theological possibility held by Ockham, entertained in one form by St. Thomas Aquinas, and recently held by Richard Cross, Thomas Flint,, and, and Timothy Pawl and concerning which individual concrete human natures an omnipotent God could assume.
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  • Castles Built on Clouds: Vague Identity and Vague Objects.Benjamin L. Curtis & Harold W. Noonan - 2014 - In Ken Akiba & Ali Abasnezhad (eds.), Vague Objects and Vague Identity: New Essays on Ontic Vagueness. Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer. pp. 305-326.
    Can identity itself be vague? Can there be vague objects? Does a positive answer to either question entail a positive answer to the other? In this paper we answer these questions as follows: No, No, and Yes. First, we discuss Evans’s famous 1978 argument and argue that the main lesson that it imparts is that identity itself cannot be vague. We defend the argument from objections and endorse this conclusion. We acknowledge, however, that the argument does not by itself establish (...)
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  • Parfit on Personal Identity: Its Analysis and (Un)importance.Ingmar Persson - 2016 - Theoria 82 (2):148-165.
    This article examines Derek Parfit's claim in Reasons and Persons that personal identity consists in non-branching psychological continuity with the right kind of cause. It argues that such psychological accounts of our identity fail, but that their main rivals, biological or animalist accounts do not fare better. Instead it proposes an error-theory to the effect that common sense takes us to be identical to our bodies on the erroneous assumption that our minds belong non-derivatively to them, whereas they in fact (...)
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  • Substance concepts and personal identity.Peter Nichols - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (2):255-270.
    According to one argument for Animalism about personal identity, animal , but not person , is a Wigginsian substance concept—a concept that tells us what we are essentially. Person supposedly fails to be a substance concept because it is a functional concept that answers the question “what do we do?” without telling us what we are. Since person is not a substance concept, it cannot provide the criteria for our coming into or going out of existence; animal , on the (...)
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  • Perception of Value and the Minimally Conscious State.Stephen Napier - 2015 - HEC Forum 27 (3):265-286.
    The “disability paradox” is the idea that for those who become severely disabled, their own quality of life assessment remains at or slightly below the QoL assessments of normal controls. This is a source of skepticism regarding third-person QoL judgments of the disabled. I argue here that this skepticism applies as well to those who are in the minimally conscious state. For rather simple means of sustaining an MCS patient’s life, the cost of being wrong that the patient would not (...)
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  • Brains, Neuroscience, and Animalism: On the Implications of Thinking Brains.Carl Gillett - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):41-52.
    The neuroscience revolution has led many scientists to posit “expansive” or “thinking” brains that instantiate rich psychological properties. As a result, some scientists now even claim you are identical to such a brain. However, Eric Olson has offered new arguments that thinking brains cannot exist due to their intuitively “abominable” implications. After situating the commitment to thinking brains in the wider scientific discussions in which they are posited, I then critically assess Olson's arguments against such entities. Although highlighting an important (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Biological Turn on Personal Identity: The Role of Science as a Response to Children’s Appropriation in Argentinian Dictatorship (1976–1983). [REVIEW]Mariana Córdoba - 2021 - Foundations of Science 26 (2):405-427.
    The philosophical problem of personal identity has been widely discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. The disputes over identity throughout time abound in references to thought experiments, excluding any connection to practical problems or to scientific knowledge and biotechnological practices. Nevertheless, some real cases challenge the pure metaphysical formulation of the problem and also show how science has an indubitable impact on the issue of identity. I will discuss the case of approximately 500 children who were appropriated during the most recent (...)
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  • Persons and Substances.Scott Campbell - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 104 (3):253-267.
    I have argued elsewhere that the psychological criterion of personalidentity entails that a person is not an object, but a series ofpsychological events. As this is somewhat counter-intuitive,I consider whether the psychological theorist can argue that a person, while not a substance, exists in a way that is akin to theway that substances exist. I develop ten criteria that such a`quasi-substance' should meet, and I argue that a reasonablecase can be made to show that the psychological theorist's conception of a (...)
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  • Another Argument for Animalism: The Argument from Causal Powers.Jimmy Alfonso Licon - 2012 - Prolegomena 11 (2):169-180.
    The causal powers that I have, such as the ability to go to the store for cold beer, for instance are the same causal powers as those had by the human animal closely associated with me. That is, the biological organism that invariably stares back at me, whenever I look in the mirror. Thus, if I want to avoid gratuitous causal overdetermination – i.e. if I want to avoid positing two separate individuals with identical, and thus redundant, causal powers – (...)
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  • Toward a Reconstruction of Self.Kathleen Wallace - 2019 - Humana Mente 12 (36).
    In this paper, I outline the cumulative network model of the self. This model articulates the self as relational, recognizing social relations as constitutive of the self. The theory arises out of concerns about the individualistic paradigms of two main frameworks in the analytic philosophical literature on personal identity, namely, the psychological and the animalist approaches to personhood and is explicitly inspired by feminist theories on relational autonomy and self. I argue that “relationality” is not only social, but that the (...)
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