Class 8: Persons

Theorizing about persons in contemporary analytic philosophy has been broken down into separate, more digestible questions.  This week we take up traditional questions about identity of persons over time and see that they can be answered by the idea that persons are interpretive objects.  We also explore what makes something person-y, and generalize our discussion of much-discussed questions about personal identity over time to analogous questions about the boundaries of persons in space and mereology.

The main assigned reading for today’s class is chapter 4 of Interpretive Objects.

As always, I have suggested background readings and some also recommended readings for thinking more about related things. This week’s recommended readings are a classic article on personal identity over time by Derek Parfit that is an early version of arguments later developed in Reasons and Persons, and an interesting piece by Mark Johnston that I also draw on in chapter four. If you aren’t sure whether I am right that a fiction can sustain any answer to the conditions of personal identity over time, you might be interested to read my highly amateurish short story, ‘The Join’, which is a more detailed story about one of Parfit’s strangest cases in his article.

This week my “also recommended” readings are some of the other background things that inform my arguments in chapter four. Eric Olson’s “human animal” theory of personal identity, developed in his book, "The Human Animal”, is very important and very different from my way of thinking. Liz Harman’s article connects to some of the issues Olson places a lot of weight on and defends the view that the moral status of a fetus can depend on its future. And Hilde Lindemann’s Holding and Letting Go is really rich and fascinating for thinking about the beginning and end of life. I don’t