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  1. A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.Hud Hudson - 2001 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
    Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution. The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the (...)
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  • Material Beings.Peter Van Inwagen - 1990 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
    According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.
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  • Brain Death without Definitions.Winston Chiong - 2005 - Hastings Center Report 35 (6):20.
    Most of the world now accepts the idea, first proposed four decades ago, that death means “brain death.” But the idea has always been open to criticism because it doesn't square with all of our intuitions about death. In fact, none of the possible definitions of death quite works. Death, perhaps surprisingly, eludes definition, and “brain death” can be accepted only as a refinement of what is in fact a fuzzy concept.
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  • (1 other version)The Impending Collapse of the Whole-Brain Definition of Death.Robert M. Veatch - 1993 - Hastings Center Report 23 (4):18.
    No one really believes that literally all functions of the entire brain must be lost for an individual to be dead. A better definition of death involves a higher brain orientation.
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  • (1 other version)Material Beings.Peter van Inwagen - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3):701-708.
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  • (2 other versions)Brain Death and Personal Identity.Michael B. Green & Daniel Wikler - 1980 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (2):105-133.
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  • Personal Identity and Dead People.David Mackie - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (3):219-242.
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  • Deconstructing the Brain Disconnection–Brain Death Analogy and Clarifying the Rationale for the Neurological Criterion of Death.Melissa Moschella - 2016 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (3):279-299.
    This article explains the problems with Alan Shewmon’s critique of brain death as a valid sign of human death, beginning with a critical examination of his analogy between brain death and severe spinal cord injury. The article then goes on to assess his broader argument against the necessity of the brain for adult human organismal integration, arguing that he fails to translate correctly from biological to metaphysical claims. Finally, on the basis of a deeper metaphysical analysis, I offer a revised (...)
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  • Determination of Death: A Scientific Perspective on Biological Integration.Maureen L. Condic - 2016 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (3):257-278.
    Human life is operationally defined by the onset and cessation of organismal function. At postnatal stages of life, organismal integration critically and uniquely requires a functioning brain. In this article, a distinction is drawn between integrated and coordinated biologic activities. While communication between cells can provide a coordinated biologic response to specific signals, it does not support the integrated function that is characteristic of a living human being. Determining the loss of integrated function can be complicated by medical interventions that (...)
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  • Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can be (...)
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  • Substance: Its Nature and Existence.Joshua Hoffman & Gary S. Rosenkrantz - 1996 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Gary S. Rosenkrantz.
    Substance has been a leading idea in the history of Western philosophy. _Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz_ explain the nature and existence of individual substances, including both living things and inanimate objects. Specifically written for students new to this important and often complex subject, _Substance_ provides both the historical and contemporary overview of the debate. Great Philosophers of the past, such as Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, and Berkeley were profoundly interested in the concept of substance. And, the authors (...)
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  • Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972. [REVIEW]John Perry - 1976 - Journal of Philosophy 73 (13):416-428.
    This is a volume of philosophical studies, centred on problems of personal identity and extending to related topics in the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy.
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  • A Defense of the Whole‐Brain Concept of Death.James L. Bernat - 1998 - Hastings Center Report 28 (2):14-23.
    The concept of whole‐brain death is under attack again. Scholars are arguing that the concept of brain death per se—regardless of the focus on “higher,” “stem” or “whole”—is fundamentally flawed. These scholars have identified what they believe are serious discrepancies between the definition and criterion of brain death, and have pointed out that medical professionals and lay persons remain confused about its meaning. Yet whole‐brain death remains the standard for determining death in much of the Western world and its defenders (...)
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  • Hylemorphism, remnant persons and personhood.Patrick Toner - 2014 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (1):76-96.
    Animalism is the doctrine that we human beings are – are identical with – animals. Hylemorphism is a form of animalism. In this paper, I defend hylemorphism by showing that while other forms of animalism fall prey to the problem of ‘Remnant Persons,’ hylemorphism does not. But hylemorphism's account of personhood seems to have some very implausible implications. I address one of those implications, and argue that it isn't nearly as objectionable as it might at first appear.
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  • (1 other version)When does a person begin?Lynne Rudder Baker - 2005 - Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2):25-48.
    According to the Constitution View of persons, a human person is wholly constituted by (but not identical to) a human organism. This view does justice both to our similarities to other animals and to our uniqueness. As a proponent of the Constitution View, I defend the thesis that the coming-into-existence of a human person is not simply a matter of the coming-into-existence of an organism, even if that organism ultimately comes to constitute a person. Marshalling some support from developmental psychology, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. [REVIEW]E. Olson - 2001 - Mind 110 (438):427-430.
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  • (1 other version)The impending collapse of the whole-brain definition of death.Robert M. Veatch - 2009 - In John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 18-24.
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  • Do dead bodies pose a problem for biological approaches to personal identity?David Hershenov - 2005 - Mind 114 (453):31-59.
    One reason why the Biological Approach to personal identity is attractive is that it doesn’t make its advocates deny that they were each once a mindless fetus.[i] According to the Biological Approach, we are essentially organisms and exist as long as certain life processes continue. Since the Psychological Account of personal identity posits some mental traits as essential to our persistence, not only does it follow that we could not survive in a permanently vegetative state or irreversible coma, but it (...)
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  • Material Beings.Michael Tye - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (4):881.
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  • The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life.Jeff McMahan - 2002 - New York, US: OUP Usa.
    A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and (...)
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  • We Are Not Human Beings.Derek Parfit - 2012 - Philosophy 87 (1):5-28.
    We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Evolution of the Soul.Richard Swinburne - 1986 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This is a revised and updated version of Swinburne's controversial treatment of the eternal philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body. He argues that we can only make sense of the interaction between the mental and the physical in terms of the soul, and that there is no scientific explanation of the evolution of the soul.
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  • The insignificance of personal identity for bioethics.David Shoemaker - 2009 - Bioethics 24 (9):481-489.
    It has long been thought that certain key bioethical views depend heavily on work in personal identity theory, regarding questions of either our essence or the conditions of our numerical identity across time. In this paper I argue to the contrary, that personal identity is actually not significant at all in this arena. Specifically, I explore three topics where considerations of identity are thought to be essential – abortion, definition of death, and advance directives – and I show in each (...)
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  • What are we?: a study in personal ontology.Eric T. Olson - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...)
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  • The metaphysics of brain death.Jeff Mcmahan - 1995 - Bioethics 9 (2):91–126.
    The dominant conception of brain death as the death of the whole brain constitutes an unstable compromise between the view that a person ceases to exist when she irreversibly loses the capacity for consciousness and the view that a human organism dies only when it ceases to function in an integrated way. I argue that no single criterion of death captures the importance we attribute both to the loss of the capacity for consciousness and to the loss of functioning of (...)
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  • The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology.Eric Todd Olson - 1997 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous thought-experiments dealing (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Personal Identity.Harold W. Noonan - 1989 - New York: Routledge.
    What is the self? And how does it relate to the body? In the second edition of Personal Identity, Harold Noonan presents the major historical theories of personal identity, particularly those of Locke, Leibniz, Butler, Reid and Hume. Noonan goes on to give a careful analysis of what the problem of personal identity is, and its place in the context of more general puzzles about identity. He then moves on to consider the main issues and arguments which are the subject (...)
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  • (1 other version)A compound of two substances.Eric T. Olson - 2001 - In Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
    Cartesian or substance dualism is the view that concrete substances come in two basic kinds. There are material things, such as biological organisms. These may be either simple or composed of parts. And there are immaterial things--minds or souls--which are always simple. No material thing depends for its existence on any soul, or vice versa. And only souls can think.
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  • Against materialism.Alvin Plantinga - 2006 - Faith and Philosophy 23 (1):3-32.
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  • What are we?Eric T. Olson - 2007 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5-6):37-55.
    This paper is about the neglected question of what sort of things we are metaphysically speaking. It is different from the mind-body problem and from familiar questions of personal identity. After explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, the paper tries to show how difficult it is to give a satisfying answer.
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  • The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology.Jim Stone - 1997 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 60 (2):495-497.
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  • (1 other version)A Compound of Two Substances.Eric T. Olson - 2001 - In Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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  • Personal Identity.Brian Garrett - 1992 - Noûs 26 (1):128-130.
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  • The human organism is not a conductorless orchestra: a defense of brain death as true biological death.Melissa Moschella - 2019 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (5):437-453.
    In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz’s ontological account of the requirements for organismal (...)
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  • Integrated But Not Whole? Applying an Ontological Account of Human Organismal Unity to the Brain Death Debate.Melissa Moschella - 2016 - Bioethics 30 (8):550-556.
    As is clear in the 2008 report of the President's Council on Bioethics, the brain death debate is plagued by ambiguity in the use of such key terms as ‘integration’ and ‘wholeness’. Addressing this problem, I offer a plausible ontological account of organismal unity drawing on the work of Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, and then apply that account to the case of brain death, concluding that a brain dead body lacks the unity proper to a human organism, and has therefore undergone (...)
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  • An Alternative to Brain Death.Jeff McMahan - 2006 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (1):44-48.
    Most contributors to the debate about brain death, including Dr. James Bernat, share certain assumptions. They believe that the concept of death is univocal, that death is a biological phenomenon, that it is necessarily irreversible, that it is paradigmatically something that happens to organisms, that we are human organisms, and therefore that our deaths will be deaths of organisms. These claims are supposed to have moral significance. It is, for example, only when a person dies that it is permissible to (...)
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  • Potentiality, irreversibility, and death.John P. Lizza - 2005 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 30 (1):45 – 64.
    There has been growing concern about whether individuals who satisfy neurological criteria for death or who become non-heart-beating organ donors are really dead. This concern has focused on the issue of the potential for recovery that these individuals may still have and whether their conditions are irreversible. In this article I examine the concepts of potentiality and irreversibility that have been invoked in the discussions of the definition of death and non-heart-beating organ donation. I initially focus on the recent challenge (...)
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  • On two reasons for denying that bodies can outlast life.Joseph LaPorte - 2009 - Mind 118 (471):795-801.
    Hershenov (2005) gives two interesting, related arguments, which he calls ‘symmetry arguments’, to the effect that a living body or an organism cannot be identical to a corpse, superficial appearances to the contrary. I relate the two arguments briefly and then criticize them for related weaknesses.
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  • A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2003 - Mind 112 (445):148-151.
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  • The problematic role of 'irreversibility' in the definition of death.David Hershenov - 2003 - Bioethics 17 (1):89–100.
    Most definitions of death – whether cardiopulmonary, whole brain and brain stem, or just upper brain – include an irreversibility condition. Cessation of function is not enough to declare death. Irreversibility should be limited to an organism's ability to ‘restart’ itself after vital organs have ceased to function. However, this would mean that every hour people who cannot be revived without the intervention of medical personnel and their technology are coming back from the dead. However, the alternative of irreversibility being (...)
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  • Twin Inc.Rose Hershenov & Derek Doroski - 2018 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (4):301-319.
    This paper presents an account of how human spontaneous embryonic chimeras are formed. On the prevalent view in the philosophical literature, it is said that chimeras are the product of two embryos that fuse to form a new third embryo. We call this version of fusion synthesis. In contrast to synthesis, we present an alternative mechanism for chimera formation called incorporation, wherein one embryo incorporates the cells of a second embryo into its body. We argue that the incorporation thesis explains (...)
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  • Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death.John Martin Fischer - 1993 - Philosophical Review 102 (3):416.
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  • Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death.Fred Feldman - 1992 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    What is death? Do people survive death? What do we mean when we say that someone is "dying"? Presenting a clear and engaging discussion of the classic philosophical questions surrounding death, this book studies the great metaphysical and moral problems of death. In the first part, Feldman shows that a definition of life is necessary before death can be defined. After exploring several of the most plausible accounts of the nature of life and demonstrating their failure, he goes on to (...)
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  • Embodied mind sparsism.Stuart Clint Dowland - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1853-1872.
    If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with (...)
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  • Logic Matters.P. T. Geach - 1972 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):127-132.
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  • (2 other versions)Brain death and personal identity.Michael B. Green & Daniel Wikler - 2009 - In John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 105 - 133.
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  • Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):127-129.
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  • All the power in the world.Peter K. Unger - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This bold and original work of philosophy presents an exciting new picture of concrete reality. Peter Unger provocatively breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell. Wiping the slate clean, Unger works, from the ground up, to formulate a new metaphysic capable of accommodating our distinctly human perspective. He proposes a world with inherently powerful particulars of two basic sorts: one mental but not physical, the other (...)
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  • The Human Animal. Personal identity without psychology.Eric T. Olson - 1997 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 192 (1):112-113.
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  • Material Beings. [REVIEW]W. R. Carter - 1992 - Review of Metaphysics 45 (4):885-887.
    Commonplace things such as hawks and handsaws pose philosophical problems at least as imposing as those presented by abstract objects such as numbers and divine beings. Van Inwagen's metaphysic of material beings emerges from what he perceives to be the proper answer to the Special Composition Question, which is, roughly, the following: Under what conditions do various things compose a single thing? The first eight sections of the book address and dismiss various extreme and moderate proposals for resolving this question. (...)
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