A hylomorphic account of thought experiments concerning personal identity

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 481-502

  Hershenov, David B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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EID: 84875350080     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq200882332     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. See Eleonore Stump, "Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism without Reductionism," Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995): 505-31;
2. David Oderberg, "Hylemorphic Dualism," Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005): 70-99;
3. Lynne Rudder Baker, "When Does a Person Begin?" Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005): 25-48, esp. 40-3;
4. Eric Olson, What Are We? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171-6. While hylomorphism is not the theory of personal identity that I personally favor, I think it is a promising and wrongfully neglected research project.
5. See Eric Olson, The Human Animal: Identity without Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42-79.
6. It is not even clear that our post-purgatory glorified resurrected bodies will be what contemporary biologists would describe as animal bodies. Aquinas writes: "Consequently those natural operations which are directed to cause or preserve the primary perfection of human nature will not be in the resurrection: such are the action of the animal life in man ⋯ and since to eat, drink, sleep, beget, pertain to the animal life, being directed to the primary perfection of nature, it follows that they will not be in the resurrection" (ST, Supplement, qu. 82, art. 4; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). See also Lynne Rudder Baker, "Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection," Religious Studies 43 (2007): 338-48. One might wonder how this claim about the glorified body coheres with Jesus' eating with his disciples after his resurrection, supposedly a model of our future resurrection. Aquinas may have to claim that Jesus needed to convince his disciples that he was real, flesh and blood, and not an apparition. Partaking in a meal would do that. Norms of courtesy, hospitality and solidarity, rather than physical need, may also prescribe sharing in a meal.
7. See David Hershenov and Rose Koch-Hershenov, "Personal Identity and Purgatory," Religious Studies 42 (2006): 439-51.
8. Van Inwagen and Olson believe that the whole brain (and brainstem) transplant would be relocating a maimed but still living human animal; see Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 172-80;
9. and Eric Olson, The Human Animal, 44-6.
10. Alan Shewmon offers a neurologically informative account that downplays the role of the brain and brainstem in the biological life of the human animal. Shewmon's account suggests that the whole brain transplant is not the moving of an animal that previously had a trunk and limbs. See D. Alan Shewmon, "The Brain and Somatic Integration: Insights into the Standard Biological Rationale for Equating 'Brain Death' with Death," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 26 (2001): 457-78.
11. For a way to handle worries about the cerebrum needing the brainstem to function and the transplant being the moving of a maimed organism, see David B. Hershenov, "The Death of a Person," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (2006): 107-20.
12. For a real-life example of substituting for a brainstem see Shewmon's discussion of R. Hassler, a German neuroscientist, whose comatose patients were aroused by electrical stimulation above their lesioned brainstem. See D. Alan Shewmon, "Recovery From 'Brain Death': A Neurologist's Apologia," Linacre Quarterly 64 (1997): 30-96, esp. 51.
13. See Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 120-3;
14. Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106.
15. The best known exception would be Baker's account of derivative properties. Her persons are contingently organisms since they borrow properties from the organism constituting them. See Baker, Persons and Bodies, 46-58, 191-212. I will be arguing for a very different conception of ourselves as contingently animals later in this paper. My approach renders us identical to an animal while Baker's has us borrowing our animality from an animal that constitutes us but to which we are not identical.
16. While the thought experiments may provide the most compelling reason to believe that we are essentially persons rather than essentially organisms, they are not the only defenses on offer. There are also the various arguments of the dualists, such as appealing to modal intuitions of disembodied existence. The strategy of some soul theorists is to defend their position by the default of their materialist rivals. They claim that the materialist cannot provide a plausible unique candidate for the subject of thought. This strategy is taken by Dean Zimmerman, "Materialist People," in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, ed. Dean Zimmerman and Michael Loux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 491-526.
17. Other immaterialists argue that the problem is not so much finding the material thinker amongst apparently equally good candidates, but finding even one appropriate material candidate; see Alvin Plantinga, "Against Materialism," Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006): 3-32.
18. Grounds for positing that we are essentially persons rather than organisms that are only contingently thinking beings have even been put forth by materialists who stress the distinctiveness of our inward life or first-person perspective. See Lynne Rudder Baker, "The Ontological Significance of Persons," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 370-88. Baker claims that these capacities distinguish us from the animal kingdom. She argues that classifying us as our animals will keep the animal kingdom from being unified, for there will be a division between organisms that have robust first-person perspectives and those that do not (see her Persons and Bodies, 12-20, 147-64).
19. Eric Olson, "The Thinking Animal and the Reference of 'I,'" Philosophical Topics 30 (2002): 189-208, at 190.
20. See Sidney Shoemaker, "Self, Body and Coincidence," Aristotelian Society Supplement 73 (1999): 287-306, esp. 300-01.
21. For a critique of Shoemaker's account, see Eric Olson, "What Does Functionalism Tell us about Personal Identity?" Nous 36 (2002): 682-98.
22. See Harold Noonan, "Animalism versus Lockeanism," Philosophical Quarterly 48 (1998): 302-318;
23. and idem, "Persons, Animals and Human Beings," in Time and Identity, ed. J. Campbell and Michael O'Rourke (Cambridge, Mass.: MIThPress, forthcoming).
24. A thoughtful study of the cognitive capacities of Baker's organisms and the persons they constitute can be found in Dean Zimmerman, "The Constitution of Persons: A Critique of Lynne Rudder Baker's Theory of Material Constitution," Philosophical Topics 30 (2002): 295-338.
25. For a critique of Noonan, see Olson, "Thinking Animals: The Reference of 'I.'"
26. See Olson, The Human Animal, 42-72;
27. David B. Hershenov, "Countering the Appeal of the Psychological Approach to Personal Identity," Philosophy 79 (2004): 445-72.
28. The source of this approach is Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 246-80.
29. The intuition that identity matters in survival is so strong that four dimensionalism even becomes more attractive than it would otherwise be to many of us. Four dimensionalism is the view that entities are extended in time, much as events are. In addition to spatial parts like your nose, you have temporal parts that are not present, such as the first half of your life. The three dimensionalist denies that we have temporal parts, instead arguing that we are "wholly present." The four dimensionalist can preserve the notion that identity is what matters in survival by maintaining that there were two temporally extended individuals (worms) each sharing the same momentary stages prior to fissioning. See Ted Sider, Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Time and Persistence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 152-61, 188-208.
30. Harold Noonan argues that Parfit's claims do violate the "only x and y rule." See his Personal Identity (London: Routledge, 2003), 129-30, 163-77, 214-30.
31. Rose Koch-Hershenov, Jason Eberl, Patrick Lee, and John Haldane all claim that this biologically more realistic view is loyal to the spirit of Aquinas's hylomorphism. See Jason Eberl, "Aquinas' Account of Human Embryogenesis and Recent Interpretations," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 30 (2005): 374-94;
32. Patrick Lee and John Haldane, "Aquinas on Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life," Philosophy 78 (2003): 255-78;
33. Rose Koch-Hershenov, "Twinning, Totipotency and Ensoulment at Fertilization," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (2006): 139-64. The authors of the three articles have all claimed that ensoulment at fertilization is compatible with Aquinas's metaphysics.
34. See Shoemaker, "Self, Body and Coincidence," 300-01.
35. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1995), part 1, section 2, chap. 1, ¶ 6, p. 357.
36. See Joseph Donceel, "Immediate Hominization and Delayed Hominization," Theological Studies 31 (1970): 76-105.
37. Aquinas seems to defend departed hominization. He writes: "In the course of corruption, first the use of reason is lost, but living and breathing remain: then living and breathing go, but a being remains, since it is not corrupted into nothing ⋯ when human being is removed, animal is not removed as a consequence" (In librum De causis expositio, 1.20-1). Passage taken from Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124
38. Eleonore Stump disagrees with this reading of Aquinas, claiming that he held the position that the human being who had earlier been alive is in purgatory but with a single part. She writes: "Similarly, it is true that on Aquinas's account a soul is not identical to a human being, but a human being can exist when he is composed of nothing more than one of his metaphysical constituents, namely his form or soul" (Aquinas [New York: Routledge, 2003], 53). Jason Eberl also has maintained the view that people will be in purgatory with only a single proper part, their soul, but he adds that they would still be animals at that time. See Jason T. Eberl, "Do Human Persons Persist between Death and Resurrection?" in Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump, ed. Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Eberl maintains that the person in purgatory should be considered an organism because of the retention of the capacity to control life processes should that person's soul come to configure the matter of a body again. Where I differ from Eberl is that I do not believe the immaterial person in purgatory should be construed as an organism.
39. Details about the problems purgatory poses for the view that we are essentially animals can be found in Koch-Hershenov and Hershenov, "Personal Identity and Purgatory," 439-57.
40. For some doubts about this matter, see the section on hylomorphism in Olson's book What Are We?, 171-6;
41. and his "A Compound of Two Substances," in Soul, Body and Survival, ed. Kevin Corcoran (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 73-88. For a response to some of Olson's worries see Koch-Hershenov and Hershenov, "Personal Identity and Purgatory."
42. He also writes, "when someone wants to understand a line, there occurs to him the phantasm of a two-foot line. But intellect understands it only with respect to the nature of quantity, not in respect of its being two feet long" (Sentencia libri De memoria et reminiscencia 45, 2.44-7 [313]).
43. Passage taken from Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 291.
44. The Thomist conception of the afterlife therefore avoids the problem of too many thinkers that Olson has shown plagues the Cartesian compound dualist. See Olson, "A Compound of Two Substances."
45. See Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard, "16 Days," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (2003): 45-78.