Surviving Death

Surviving Death

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 1-393

  Johnston, Mark ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79952586532     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (204)

1. Notwithstanding the fact that the tradition is now somewhat divided about the afterlife, and in particular about the old Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.
2. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Hackett, 1981), 82. In thinking about Kant on this topic, I have learned much from David Sussman's very illuminating discussion of Kant's anthropology in The Idea of Humanity (Routledge, 2001), and from Paul Guyer and Desmond Hogan, who made extremely helpful suggestions along the way.
3. See Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett, 1997).
4. For a detailed naturalistic discussion of the fallen condition of humanity, and of our corresponding need for salvation, even given the naturalistic point of view, see my Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton University Press, 2009).
5. The ghost ball method is an inaccurate method of aiming because of what is known as "contact-induced throw," a friction effect that occurs when the cue ball hits the object ball and drags it along with it.
6. These are central themes of Saving God.
7. Oddly enough, Philip was born almost two hundred years after the death of Ruiz and was still alive, though quite ill, in 1586, the date of the painting. So in any one of the twelve years until his actual death in 1598 Philip was in a position to visit this very painting and see himself in heaven. I do not know if he ever saw it.
8. See G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy 33 (1954).
9. John Locke, On the Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (Clarendon Press, 1999), edited with an introduction and notes by John C. Higgins-Biddle. It's a tough work to get through. In his essay in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., If I Should Die (Notre Dame University Press, 2001), Aaron Garrett discusses these and other passages by way of providing an intriguing narrative of the gradual mutation of the idea of immortality from the period of Scotus through to Locke.
10. As quoted in Norman Burns's brilliant history of the matter, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Harvard University Press, 1972).
11. Burns (Christian Mortalism) has a nice discussion of Milton and Hobbes on these matters.
12. Luther's soul-sleeping and his denial of individual judgment before the General Resurrection are obviously ill suited to handle the manifest content of the parable of Dives and Lazarus at Luke 16:19-34. This point applies a fortiori to those Christian mortalists who endorse Thnetopsychism. No fiddling with commas makes the obvious import of this parable go away.
13. See David Lewis, "Survival and Identity," in Amelie O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (University of California Press, 1976);.
14. Anthony Quinton, "The Soul," Journal of Philosophy 59 (1962): 393-409;.
15. Sydney Shoemaker, with Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Blackwell, 1984).
16. Shoemaker clearly had some sympathy for the view that bodily continuity is constitutive of personal identity when he wrote Self- Knowledge and Self- Identity (Cornell University Press, 1963), although he allowed that in exceptional cases the bodily criterion of personal identity could be overridden by the memory criterion. He decisively abandons the bodily criterion in "Persons and Their Pasts," American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970): 269-85.
17. See Lewis, "Survival and Identity." This proposal is discussed in detail below. 17Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, Chapter 27, Section 9. 18John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Fortress Press, 1996), 163pp.
18. Peter van Inwagen, "The Possibility of Resurrection," International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 9 (1978), reprinted in Paul Edwards, ed., Immortality (Macmillan, 1992). Van Inwagen's views are discussed in detail in the addendum to this lecture.
19. As late as the seventeenth century, even distinguished members of the Royal Society were still agonizing about the cannibals. For example, Robert Boyle, in his essay, "Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection," writes, Robert Boyle, Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, ed. M. A. Stewart (Manchester University Press, 1979), 198.
20. I have in mind a position on which the auxiliary principle is replaced by a principle governing when two non-identical body stages make up the same four-dimensional worm. Then we might say, in the fashion of David Lewis, that the two perimortem duplicates remain distinct but become exactly coincident in the afterlife. This idea is discussed in the section titled "Are We Worms?".
21. From here on, when an asterisk is attached to the heading of a section, it is an indication that the section will be primarily of interest to philosophical specialists and may be skipped by the non-specialist reader without much loss.
22. For direct difficulties with the bodily criterion of personal identity itself, and what is now called "Animalism," see my "My Body Is Not an Animal," in D. Zimmerman, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 4 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
23. See the addendum to this lecture for an examination of the weird possibilities.
24. In writing of truths and necessities holding thanks to the essences of certain items and not others I am directly relying on Kit Fine's clarification and subsequent formalization of this crucial notion. See, for example, his "Senses of Essence," in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Modality, Morality, and Belief: Essays in Honour of Ruth Barcan Marcus (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and "The Logic of Essence," Journal of Philosophical Logic 24 (1995).
25. The thought that God's will enters in here to secure an identity that would not otherwise hold is a version of identity voluntarism, explicitly argued against in the section titled "Identity Voluntarism, the Last Temptation.".
26. Again, the idea of a necessity holding in virtue of the essences of some entities and not in virtue of the essences of other entities is an idea that Fine has done so much to make clear. Even if the essences of things derive from the essence of God, there are still some (necessary) truths that hold thanks to those derivative essences, such as the truth that I am necessarily self-identical. The specification of the truths that are grounded by those derivative essences will include many necessary truths. The subclass of these that makes no reference to God and his will are mundane necessities in my sense.
27. Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141. For some complaints that Murphy has not made her position on personal identity fully clear, in effect that she sometimes seems to hover indecisively between the bodily and the psychological criterion, see Lynne Rudder Baker's review in the online publication, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Myself, I think that Murphy's remarks about the early Church's struggle with issues of material continuity (the cannibals and the like) make her position quite clear.
28. "Lewis, "Survival and Identity".
29. Mark Johnston, "Human Beings," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), reprinted in M. Tooley, ed., Metaphysics (Garland Press, 1993), in J. Kim and E. Sosa, eds., Metaphysics: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell, 1999), and in Postgraduate Foundation in Philosophy (Open University Press, 2002). Alexander quoted the beginning: "Most of us hope for a kind of philosophy that is precise without desiccating its object, so that the results of a philosophical investigation might answer a question which was still worth asking.".
30. See, e.g., David S. Oderburg, "Johnston on Human Beings," Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989).
31. Denis Robinson, "Human Animals, Human Beings, and Mentalistic Survival" in D. Zimmerman, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 4 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
32. This is related to the very surprising fact that we perceive the motion of objects, and hence their identity over time, directly, that is, not by perceiving their varying positions at different times.
33. There is some empirical evidence that quite early on we employ a double-track approach to tracing animals and selves, evidence sometimes described as showing that young children are natural mind-body dualists. See J. Bering, "The Folk Psychology of Souls," Behavioural and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453-62.
34. J. Bering, C. Hernandez-Blasi, and D. Bjorklund, "The Development of 'Afterlife' Beliefs in Religiously and Secularly Schooled Children," British Journal of Developmental Psychology 23 (2005): 587-607.
35. For a more complete development of this view of a substance, see chapters 4 and 5 of my "Particulars and Persistence" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University 1984), and my "Hylomorphism," Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006), where many issues from my thesis are taken up.
36. For a defense of this claim, see the section titled "Are We Stages?".
37. "See the remarks on Roderick Chisholms view in lecture three.
38. "Typical is G.E.M. Anscombe's use of this idea of a person in her "Twenty Opinions Common among Anglo-American Philosophers," in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, eds., Faith in a Hard Ground (Imprint Academic, 2007). Thanks to John Haldane for drawing my attention to this collection of essays.
39. For more on Christian reliance on the bodily criterion and the like, see the addendum to this lecture.
40. This point was made to me by Eden Lin. A further observation is that the principle counts strict reproduction of body states at any two times as a kind of bodily return or resurrection.
41. Mark Johnston, "Constitution Is Not Identity," Mind 101 (1992), reprinted in Michael Rae, ed., Material Constitution (Cornell University Press, 1995). See the discussion of the "third theory of temporal predication," described as the analog of David Lewis's theory of multiple counterpart relations (90-93).
42. "Dickens's character Mr. Samuel Pickwick allowed himself the privilege of using words in nonstandard senses.
43. Ted Sider, "All the World's a Stage," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996): 446. See also his Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Oxford University Press, 2001). Stage theory is also defended in Katherine Hawley's How Things Persist (Oxford University Press, 2001) and by Achille Varsi in "Naming the Stages," Dialectica 57 (2003).
44. Why "deeply" disjunctive? Well, the stage theorist can note that a stage is trivially, as it were by stipulation, a temporal counterpart of itself, and he can then say in a non-disjunctive fashion that to exist at a time is to have a temporal counterpart at that time. But this superficially non-disjunctive account is still deeply disjunctive, for there are two very, very different ways of having a temporal counterpart at a time. One is by way of being identical with that counterpart, and the other is not.
45. For an extended discussion of masking, see my "How to Speak of the Colors" Philosophical Studies 86 (1992), reprinted in A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, eds., The Philosophy of Color (MIT Press, 1997).
46. Of course, without instantaneous or arbitrarily short-lived stages the whole theory of persisting by perduring breaks down. If a stage endures for a second, or even a microsecond, then the game can quickly be seen to be up.
47. "Sider, "All the World's a Stage," 448.
48. Why "mysterious?" Well, as everyone admits, we obviously do think and talk about "unnatural things." So just how "strong" is the reference-magnetic force, how do we measure it, and what predictions does the strength of the force make when it comes to just what is required to pry us from the natural defaults that are the alleged reference magnets? Please don't just describe the cases, then describe the desired results, and then say that the force is strong enough to get the desired results.
49. For more on this claim, see the addendum to this lecture.
50. See, e.g., their respective contributions to Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman, eds., Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford University Press, 2006).
51. In what follows here, and after the text of each of the other lectures, the questions that appear were asked by people who attended or read the lectures. I have noted who pressed the question, when the person was known to me. I hope that I have given the questions their proper force and emphasis; if and where I have failed to do this I apologize to the relevant questioner. Some of the answers are the answers I should have given, or they fill out in more detail the answers I did give. I have omitted the questions that sought clarifications of points when those clarifications were contained in the long text from which the lectures were sampled. It is that text that is here presented in an updated and revised form.
52. Anthony Appiah.
53. As to how early we are aware of persons as such, there is recent evidence that as early as fifteen months infants are surprised by intentional action that does not fit the perceived reality of the situation. See Kristine Onishi, Renee Beillargeon, and Alan Leslie, "15-Month-Old Infants Detect Violations in Pretend Scenarios," Acta Psychologica 81 (2007), which vindicates a crucial empirical prediction of the seminal work of Alan Leslie on pretense.
54. Ron Mallon.
55. "Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future," Philosophical Review 79 (1970).
56. Adam Elga.
57. Gilbert Harman.
58. Nicholas Stang.
59. Edin Lin.
60. "Carla Merino-Rajme. 65John Haven Spencer.
61. In lecture three we shall consider another answer to this question, one not ruled out by Paul's remarks, for he really only insists that persons be revivified. For a detailed and authoritative account of the Pauline doctrine of resurrection, see Murray J. Harris, "Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus," in Richard H. Longenecker, ed., Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament (William B. Eerdmans, 1998). Harris emphasizes that Pauline resurrection is at the same time revivification ("resuscitation," as he puts it), transformation, and exaltation.
62. Van Inwagen, "The Possibility of Resurrection," 119.
63. "William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Cornell University Press, 2001), 223. In this well-argued book, Hasker briefly mentions the life of the phoenix as emblematic of resurrection, something I take up in lecture five.
64. Dean Zimmerman, "The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: 'The Falling Elevator' Model," Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 197.
65. "As a tu quoque to Zimmerman, this is not inaccurate or unjust, but it is in a certain way unfair, for he was simply trying to help out the adherents of body resurrection.
66. Dean Zimmerman, "Materialism and Survival," in Eleanor Stump and Michael Murray, eds., Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 1999), 381.
67. An alternative is the "Lewis view" of fission, according to which equal fission is consistent with identity because it simply shows that the number of particles was the same before and after fission, thanks to pre-fission collocation of particles. The upshot of the Lewis view in this case is that there have been two wholly coincident bodies all along, finally distinguished by perimortem fission. One dies, the other never does. Again, on this adaptation of the Lewis view there is no literal resurrection. There is just a preternatural perimortem sleight of hand.
68. David Hershenov offers some different but related objections to this idea in "Van Inwagen, Zimmerman and the Materialist Concept of the Resurrection," Religious Studies 38 (2002).
69. This may be the version of Zimmerman's proposal that Kevin Corcoran is depicting in one of his diagrams in the helpful essay, "Physical Persons and Post-Mortem Survival without Temporal Gaps," in his edited volume, Soul, Body, and Survival (Cornell University Press, 2001).
70. Recall G.E.M. Anscombe's use of this idea of a person in her "Twenty Opinions.".
71. "Identity Mysticism" is Dean Zimmerman's nice term for this kind of position. He provides his own argument against identity mysticism in his intricate essay, "Criteria of Identity and the 'Identity Mystics,'" Erkenntnis 48 (1998).
72. See the discussion of point particle collision in my "Is There a Problem about Persistence?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88 (1987), reprinted in S. Haslanger, ed., Persistence: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2006).
73. For more on the status of this kind of consideration, see my "Hylomorphism.".
74. Compare Trenton Merricks, "There Are No Criteria of Identity Over Time," Nous 32 (1998).
75. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin (Yale University Press, 1970), 401.
76. John Taylor, The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (M. Waugh, 1767), 108-9.
77. For contemporary discussions of these issues, see John Kearney, "Jona- than Edwards and the Imputation of Adam's Sin," Princeton Theological Review 8 (2001), and the essays by Oliver Crisp and Paul Helm in Crisp and Helm, eds., Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian (Ashgate Press, 2003).
78. Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Lutterworth Press, 1939), 475-76.
79. Oscar Cullman, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (Macmillan, 1958), 17.
80. A similar view is expressed by Elaine Pagels in her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2004).
81. On the relations between Apocalypticism, the Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, the destruction of the temple, the Babylonian exile, and the fate of the martyrs in the Mac-cabean war, see Alan F. Segal's magisterial work, Life after Death: The History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (Doubleday, 2004).
82. For the beginnings of such an account, see my Saving God.
83. See Phaedo in Plato, Complete Works.
84. A. J. Ayer's own account of the experience appeared as "What I Saw When I Was Dead," National Review, October 14, 1988.
85. In his "Mental Events," Donald Davidson famously attempts to rule out a priori any dualism of mental and physical events. See Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980). For resistance to this whole approach, see my "Why Having a Mind Matters," in Ernest LePore and Brian McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Blackwell, 1985).
86. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Everyman Library, 1990), 9.
87. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Humanities Press, 1978), 95-101.
88. "Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Basil Blackwell, 1987), 60. 14See Strawson's reply to J. L. Mackie's "The Transcendental 'I,'" in Zak van Straaten, ed., Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson (Oxford, 1980).
89. At the end of the day, after an enormous amount of revisionary work, we may be led to the view that there is nothing better for an occurrence of "I" to refer to than the person who uttered it. But this is best understood as a reconstruction of our practice, after a surprising discovery of the failure of "I" to refer to something like a self.
90. "Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New Directions, 1964), 246-47.
91. I don't mean "is semantically equivalent to" by "comes to," as lecture three will illustrate. Val-berg makes a structurally similar point about this kind of example, but he appeals to his notion of a horizon rather than to the arena. For a comparison and contrast of our respective views, see the addendum to this lecture.
92. See Mark Johnston, "Manifest Kinds," Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 564-83.
93. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1980).
94. Notice something that will turn out to be crucial in what follows. In making these claims I am not asserting claims of diachronic identity, or identity over time, for this arena of presence and action. My own view is that such claims are in themselves radically indeterminate. The issue is instead whether anything that could be given to me now in just the same phenomenological and evidential way as this arena of presence and action could be anything other than this arena of presence and action.
95. For more on this idea of a pre-verbal structure of affect, see Mark Johnston, "The Authority of Affect," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, no. 4 (2001): 181-214.
96. Perhaps this distinction has some affinity with Martin Heidegger's distinction between my death and my ownmost death. See his Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and E. S. Robinson (Harper and Row, 1962), 279ff. In any case, in what follows, I shall appropriate Heidegger's term for my subjective death.
97. For more on the uncanny nature of birth and death, see Thomas Nagel's chapter, "Birth, Death and the Meaning of Life," in The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1996). Caspar Hare in On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009), while giving expression to a very sophisticated form of solipsism, describes his own subjective birth as an uncanny and unbelievable event.
98. A point also made by Valberg.
99. David Hume, "Of Personal Identity," A Treatise of Human Nature (Clarendon, 1888), 252.
100. "See J. Pearn and C. Gardner Thorpe, "Jules Cotard (1840-1889): His Life and the Unique Syndrome Which Bears His Name," Neurology 58 (2002).
101. A. W. Young and K. M. Leafhead, "Betwixt Life and Death: Case Studies of the Cotard Delusion," in P. W. Halligan and J. C. Marshall, eds., Method in Madness: Case Studies in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry (Psychology Press, 1996).
102. What is the connection between a consciousness, an arena of presence, and a self? In the next lecture, I identify an arena with a consciousness (in contradistinction to a stream of consciousness), and I explain selves in terms of arenas.
103. Mark Johnston, "Human Interests without Superlative Selves," in J. Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Basil Blackwell, 1996), reprinted in R. Martin and J. Barresi, eds., Personal Identity (Basil Blackwell, 2002).
104. "Philip Pettit.
105. Michael Smith.
106. Valberg, Dream, Death and the Self, 482. My italics.
107. See the preface to Kripke, Naming and Necessity. There is a choice about how to implement the idea of the rigidity of the name "Martin Amis" with respect to situations in which Amis does not exist. We can say that the name still denotes Amis in such circumstances-after all, "Amis does not exist" is true of those circumstances-or we can restrict the notion of the rigidity of a designator so that it only requires unvarying designation in all situations in which it designates anything.
108. This remains true on the account below, which recognizes two uses of "I." "I" remains rigid in each of its uses, so any given use either rigidly refers to a person or rigidly refers to a self. When, in describing a dream in which I was Hannibal, I say, "I was not myself last night," the first use of "I" rigidly refers to this self and the second rigidly refers to Johnston.
109. See Galen Strawson, "The Self," in J. Barresi and R. Martin, eds., Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003). In The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel parses "I am Thomas Nagel" as something like "This objective self occupies the perspective of Thomas Nagel." In a lecture appearing on YouTube, a lecture given in 2006, Saul Kripke seems to endorse the view that "I" denotes a self or ego; but he resolutely withholds anything more on what a self is and how it could get to be semantically associated with the use of "I.".
110. A question pursued in fascinating detail by Peter van Inwagen in his Material Beings, where he.
111. Joseph Butler, "Of Personal Identity," in Samuel Halifax, ed., The Analogy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1849), 305.
112. Roderick Chisholm, Person and Object (Open Court, 1976).
113. One of the most telling difficulties is the "causal pairing problem" raised in its modern form by Jaegwon Kim. The best discussion of this problem known to me is in Hong Yu Wong's very careful essay "Cartesian Psychophysics," in van Inwagen and Zimmerman, eds., Persons.
114. See the discussion of the "bare locus" view in my "Human Beings.".
115. Consider the empirical evidence cited earlier, in particular the work of Bering, "The Folk Psychology of Souls.".
116. Lewis, "Survival and Identity.".
117. Essay, Book 2, Chapter XXVII.
118. Lynne Rudder Baker, "Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection," Religious Studies 43 (2007): 345.
119. Peter Van Inwagen, "'I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come,'" a manuscript posted on http://philosophy.nd.edu/people/all/profiles/van-inwagen-peter/documents/Resurrection.doc.
120. Lynne Rudder Baker, "The Difference that Self-Consciousness Makes," in Klaus Petrus, ed., On Human Persons (Ontos Verlag, 2003), 23pp.
121. For more on this way of thinking about the issue, see my "Objectivity of Mind and the Objectivity of Our Minds," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2007).
122. I am assuming that Macbeth hallucinated a dagger, but there was not some dagger that Macbeth hallucinated. This may be unfaithful to Shakespeare's text, at least if we are supposed to understand Macbeth as hallucinating the dagger he used to kill Duncan. But I am taking him to just see Mark Johnston, "The Obscure Object of Hallucination," Philosophical Studies 120 (2004): 113-83.
123. For more discussion of these issues, see my "The Obscure Object of Hallucination." MIn the sense of notional as it arises in Quine's distinction between the notional and relational readings of sentences with psychological verbs and noun phrase objects.
124. William Hazlitt, Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (London, 1805; repr., with an introduction, by John H. Nabholz, Gainesville, Florida, 1969), 6.
125. It is to Raymond Martin and John Barresi that we owe the widespread appreciation of Hazlitt's work as a deeply insightful anticipation of the contemporary discussion of "what matters in survival." See their "Hazlitt on the Future of the Self," Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 463-81. Unfortunately, Hazlitt's argument for the conclusion quoted above depends on recapitulating Butler's confusion to the effect that only a mereologically unchanging entity can exhibit "strict identity." This also led to Hazlitt's acceptance of the resurrection as securing "loose and popular identity" and so being as good as what he took to be on offer in this life.
126. A notable exception is Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1976).
127. "Christopher Peacocke.
128. Michael Stocker, "Psychic Feelings: Their Importance and Irreducibility" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983).
129. An audience member unknown to me.
130. A follow-up question.
131. This lecture was presented at Princeton's Rockefeller Center for Human Values.
132. For more on this idea, and a discussion of how it might figure in a naturalistic account of an insight embodied in the myth of the Fall, see Saving God.
133. Mutatis mutandis for the interpretation of Neo-Lockeanism as governing sequences of substances. There are no superlative sequences either.
134. Just a note on terminology, which will be helpful in what follows. When I capitalize, as in "Human Being," "Hibernator," and "Teletransporter," I mean to pick out those that have been ac-culturated in the relevant way. So, a Human Being is one who has been acculturated in the ways of the Human Beings, and a Teletransporter is one who has been acculturated in the ways of the Tele-transporters. But of course, a Teletransporter at each time at which he exists is-the "is" of constitution-some human being (or human animal), though not necessarily the same human being (or human animal). I shall also write of the kind human being and the relation of being the very same human being.
135. I emphasize natural essence to contrast with the essences of qua-objects like Socrates sitting, an object which is, by construction, essentially sitting. So a human being qua person might be essentially a person, but Wiggins's point is really not affected by this. See his Sameness and Substance, p. 172.
136. As Thomas Nagel established in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1976).
137. See "My Body Is Not an Animal," particularly the discussion of animalism's odd implication that removing your brain from your body and then letting your body die while your brain is kept alive would thereby create a new person.
138. You could of course follow Peter Geach and define a notion of "relative identity," but it is bootless to do so because the questions we are interested in-questions like "Will I survive?" or "Will any person around after the event be me?"-are questions framed in terms of numerical identity. You would need to argue that numerical identity is incoherent in order to make a notion of relative identity interesting as a successor notion. And that is none too easy a thing to do, for the notion of numerical identity is so simple it is very difficult for its constituent parts to rub together inconsistently.
139. Nor do I insist that being a person does not admit of degree. Once we explain and accept something like Locke's second, oft neglected, clause in his characterization of a person, namely that a person has a "concernment" as he call it, we shall see a way in which some persons can be less than "fully fledged.".
140. An individual personality is more like an aspect or a process than a substance; when we trace ourselves and each other we are not offloading onto individual personalities.
141. In these remarks, I am partly guided by the important work of Michael Bratman on rational agency, intention, and planning. See, in particular, his Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
142. Also seminal, particularly when it comes to the way in which the requirement of finding oneself cross-temporally intelligible can reasonably enforce psychological continuity, is the work of David Velleman; see the preface to his essays collected in Self to Self (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
143. This is one of several respects in which my account of individual personality differs from Christine Korsgaard's impressive account of moral agency and moral personality. See her The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
144. For those who think of this as a dramatic overstatement, I recommend a perusal of the 1822 Bigge Report to Lord Bathurst, in which John Thomas Bigge laments the way in which the emancipation of convicts and the expenditure on public works within the colony was muddying the clarity of the original British plan for the construction of a gulag on a huge scale.
145. Here I am diverging from my previous discussion of these matters in "Relativism and The Self" in M. Krausz, éd., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame University Press, 1990).
146. In thus emphasizing the constitutive demand of personhood, the demand that one live one's life, that one guide one's life by one's conception of the good, we connect with something like Locke's "second clause" in his characterization of a person, namely that a person have a "concernment.".
147. As Thomas Nagel convincingly argued in The Possibility of Altruism.
148. This again is a change in view from that expressed in "Relativism and the Self.".
149. For more detail on this argument, see Mark Johnston, "How to Speak of the Colors," Philosophical Studies 86 (1992): 221-63, reprinted in A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, eds., The Philosophy of Color (MIT Press, 1997).
150. For an interesting account of how one might deny this and save the simple view, see John Campbell, "A Simple View of Color," in John J. Haldane and Crispin Wright, eds., Reality: Representation and Projection (Oxford University Press, 1993).
151. Almost all work on the philosophy of color, my own early work included, ignores the crucial distinction between cherry red and being cherry red, i.e., between the quality that is the shade or color and the property that is having that shade as your surface, volume or radiant color. I hope to rectify this widespread conflation in the future, but for some preliminary discussion of the issue, see "Objectivity of Mind and the Objectivity of Our Mind.".
152. The appeal to the micro-physical and light-reflective properties themselves would have been the best explanation if those properties had exhibited some kind of uniformity with respect to the determination of color experience, but notoriously they do not. See, for example, Larry Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Hackett, 1988).
153. For a different development of these ideas, in part prompted by "Relativism and the Self" see David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West, "Temporal-Phase Pluralism," Philosophy and Phenom-enological Research, LX, 2001, and David Braddon-Mitchell and Kristie Miller "How to Be a Conventional Person," forthcoming in The Monist. In a series of unpublished lectures given at Oxford University, Dean Zimmerman has explored various ways of embodying the thought that personal identity or more exactly its implementation is a response-dependent matter.
154. In "Relativism and the Self.".
155. A suggestion made by Jamie Tappenden.
156. Epistemidsts typically explain what they regard as the kind of ignorance that goes under the heading of indeterminacy by appeal to the existence of many candidate meanings that differ just a little in meaning. One, and only one, of these gets picked by how we use a word, thanks to hypersensitive rules about how use determines meaning. So, on this view, what we describe as vagueness or indeterminacy is our inability to see or discover just what we mean and where what we mean draws the crucial line. But if we recognize the so-called penumbral truth then we should not think of the difference between the Human Beings and the Teletransporters in that kind of way. (A point made to me by Dean Zimmerman.).
157. Saving God.
158. An audience member unknown to me.
159. Sarah-Jane Leslie.
160. Philip Pettit.
161. Eden Lin.
162. An audience member unknown to me.
163. Sarah-Jane Leslie.
164. As it occurs in "My Body is not an Animal.".
165. John Stuart Mill, "The Utility of Religion," in Three Essays on Religion (Hackett, 1998), 119.
166. For an elaboration of this point, see Mark Johnston, "Reasons and Reductionism," Philosophical Review 101 (1992). For copyright reasons much of the same material of this essay had to be reworked in a different form for J. Dancy's volume, Reading Parfit (Basil Blackwell, 1996), where it appears as "Human Concerns without Superlative Selves".
167. See my "Human Concerns without Superlative Selves," Parfit's ninety-page reply at http://www .ammonius.com/, and my reply that will soon be posted there.
168. See, e.g., D. K. Lewis, "Survival and Identity" and "Reply to Parfit," in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1987), along with Ernest Sosa's probing examination of Parfit's position in "Surviving Matters," reprinted in R. Martin and J. Barresi, eds., Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003).
169. Roy W. Perrett, "Personal Identity, Minimalism and Madhayamaka," Philosophy East and West 52 (2002). There Perrett also has some worthwhile things to say about Parfit's first reply to "Human Concerns without Superlative Selves.".
170. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1986), 285-86.
171. Johnston, "Reasons and Reductionism.".
172. See Derek Parfit, "Why Our Identity Is Not What Matters," in R. Martin and J. Barresi, eds., Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003).
173. From The Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. Horace Gregory (Viking Press, 1958), 425-26.
174. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Politics and Theology (Princeton University Press, 1997), for the relevant history of the corporation sole and the myth of the Phoenix as its analogy.
175. Nothing, of course, should be read into the fact that this Greek word anastasis that is so well suited for describing the process of assuming a higher-order identity is the word used by Paul in his epistles to describe the resurrection.
176. Here I am echoing Thomas Nagel's remarks about altruism in The Possibility of Altruism.
177. Others may contemplate more restrictive bounds on the dispositions of the good, bounds forced by stronger variants on premise 5, but this is as far as I am prepared to go here.
178. See his brilliant work, Love and Its Place in Nature (Yale University Press, 1999).
179. And philosophical discussion of the theme of natural hope, utterly important if there is ever to be such a thing as a naturalistic discussion of salvation, cannot but take Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006) as a master text.
180. See, in particular, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974).
181. G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
182. Schopenhauer writes:.
183. On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Hackett, 1998), 172.
184. Wagner, then in Venice, composed the letter, titled "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love" ("Geschlechtsliebe") to Arthur Schopenhauer in December 1858. Here is a translation, due to Boris Kment.
185. A theme of my "Hylomorphism.".
186. What is true, of course, is that the initial individual personalities of the good do not exercise any distinctive prospective control over the deliberation and action of the individual personalities associated with the future bodies or organisms that come to constitute them.
187. Perhaps the best exploration and defense of this theme is given in Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2007).
188. See also his "Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator," in Nicholas Martin, ed., Nietzsche and the German Tradition (Peter Lang, 2003).
189. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Random House, 1974).
190. An audience member unknown to me.
191. A follow-up from the previous questioner.
192. David Wiggins, Identity and Spatiotemporal Continuity (Oxford, 1967), 51ff.
193. For a more complete discussion of the paradox, and a solution I am now less happy with, see my "Fission and the Facts," in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 3 (University of California Press, 1989).
194. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard University Press, 1981), 29-70.
195. Lewis, "Survival and Identity".
196. Does this provide a solution to the problem of perimortem duplicates? No, it does not. There we have two people dying at different times, not one person who was multiply embodied and who then becomes singly embodied at his resurrection by reassembly.
197. Thomas Kelly.
198. An audience member unknown to me.
199. Matt. 20:1-16.
200. Elizabeth Harman and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
201. Justin Alderis and Hedrik Lorenz.
202. Michael Forster and Ade Artemis.
203. On the nature of generics and generic thought, see Gregory Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier, eds., The Generic Book (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
204. Sarah-Jane Leslie, "Generics: Cognition and Acquisition," Philosophical Review 117 (2007), "The Original Sin of Cognition," forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy, and her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press.