Results for 'Eric Todd Olson'
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- The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology.EricToddOlson -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,EricOlson 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 with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)
- Eric T.Olson warum wir tiere sind.EricOlson -manuscriptWas sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Körpern gleichzusetzen. Wir sind etwas (...) anderes als Tiere. Kaum anderer Meinung sind Denker nicht-westlicher Traditionen. Und rund neun von zehn Philosophen, die heutzutage über Probleme der personalen Identität nachdenken, vertreten Ansichten, die ausschließen, daß wir Tiere sind. (shrink)Export citation
Bookmark - 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 (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a viewOlson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)
- The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology.Eric T.Olson (ed.) -1997 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr.Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.
- (2 other versions)Personal identity.Eric T.Olson -2002 - In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield,Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell.Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on personal identity in Eastern philosophy, which I am not competent (...) to discuss. Collins 1982 is a good source.). (shrink)
- Was I ever a fetus?Eric T.Olson -1997 -Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1):95-110.The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)
- Animalism and the corpse problem.Eric T.Olson -2004 -Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2):265-74.The apparent fact that each of us coincides with a thinking animal looks like a strong argument for our being animals (animalism). Some critics, however, claim that this sort of reasoning actually undermines animalism. According to them, the apparent fact that each human animal coincides with a thinking body that is not an animal is an equally strong argument for our not being animals. I argue that the critics' case fails for reasons that do not affect the case for animalism.
- Thinking Animals and the Reference of ‘I’.Eric T.Olson -2002 -Philosophical Topics 30 (1):189-207.In this essay I explore the idea that the solution to some important problems of personal identity lies in the philosophy of language: more precisely in the nature of first-person reference. I will argue that the “linguistic solution” is at best partly successful.
- The passage of time.Eric T.Olson -2009 - In Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron,The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. New York: Routledge.The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)
- The Dualist Project and the Remote-Control Objection.Eric T.Olson -2021 -Roczniki Filozoficzne 69 (1):89-101.Substance dualism says that all thinking beings are immaterial. This sits awkwardly with the fact that thinking requires an intact brain. Many dualists say that bodily activity is causally necessary for thinking. But if a material thing can cause thinking, why can’t it think? No argument for dualism, however convincing, answers this question, leaving dualists with more to explain than their opponents.
- Lowe's defence of constitutionalism.Eric T.Olson -2003 -Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):92–95.Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I (...) argue that he is mistaken on both counts. (shrink)
- The Paradox of Increase.Eric T.Olson -2006 -The Monist 89 (3):390-417.It seems evident that things sometimes get bigger by acquiring new parts. But there is an ancient argument purporting to show that this is impossible: the paradox of increase or growing argument.i Here is a sketch of the paradox. Suppose we have an object, A, and we want to make it bigger by adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part. Imagine, then, that we conjoin (...) B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what A and B are, or what this conjoining amounts to: let A be anything that can gain a part if anything can gain a part, and let B be the sort of thing that can become a part of A, and suppose we do whatever it would take to make B come to be a part of A if this is possible at all. Have we thereby made B a part of A? It seems not. We seem only to have brought it about that B is attached to A, like this. (shrink)
- The Epicurean View of Death.Eric T.Olson -2013 -The Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2):65-78.The Epicurean view is that there is nothing bad about death, and we are wrong to loathe it. This paper distinguishes several different such views, and shows that while some of them really would undermine our loathing of death, others would not. It then argues that any version that did so could be at best vacuously true: If there is nothing bad about death, that can only be because there is nothing bad about anything.
- Swinburne’s Brain Transplants.Eric T.Olson -2018 -Philosophia Christi 20 (1):21-29.Richard Swinburne argues that if my cerebral hemispheres were each transplanted into a different head, what would happen to me is not determined by my material parts, and I must therefore have an immaterial part. The paper argues that this argument relies on modal claims that Swinburne has not established. And the means he proposes for establishing such claims cannot succeed.
- The Remnant-Person Problem.Eric T.Olson -forthcoming - In Stephan Blatti Paul F. Snowdon,Essays on Animalism. Oxford University Press.Animalism is the view that you and I are animals. That is, we are animals in the straightforward sense of having the property of being an animal, or in that each of us is identical to an animal-not merely in the derivative sense of having animal bodies, or of being "constituted by" animals. And by 'animal' I mean an organism of the animal kingdom." Sensible though it may appear, animalism is highly contentious. The most common objection is that it conflicts (...) with widespread and deep beliefs about our identity over time. These beliefs are brought out in reactions to fictional cases. Suppose, for instance, that your brain is transplanted into my head. The being who ends up with that organ, everyone assumes, will remember your life and not mine. More generally, he will have your beliefs, preferences, plans, and other mental properties, for the most part at least. Who would he be-you, me, or someone else? (shrink)
- March 7, 2007 Ethics in Business Management.ToddEric Lewis -2006 - In Laurie Dimauro,Ethics. Greenhaven Press.
- Life After Death and the Devastation of the Grave.Eric T.Olson -2015 - In Keith Augustine & Michael Martin,The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 409-423.This paper—written for nonspecialist readers—asks whether life after death is in any sense possible given the apparent fact that after we die our remains decay to the point where only randomly scattered atoms remain. The paper argues that this is possible only if our remains are not in fact dispersed in this way, and discusses how that might be the case. -/- 1. Life After Death -- 2. Total Destruction -- 3. The Soul -- 4. Body-Snatching -- 5. Radical Resurrection (...) -- 6. Irreversibility -- 7. Atomic Reassembly -- 8. The Transporter -- 9. Replicas and Originals -- 10. Survival and Causal Connections. (shrink)
- The Person and the Corpse.Eric T.Olson -2012 - In Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman & Jens Johansson,The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death. Oxford University Press. pp. 80.
- The Question.Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter explains what it means to ask what we are. It begins by breaking the question up into smaller ones, such as what we are made of, what parts we have, and whether we are substances. It makes clear that the question is not about people in general, but only about us human people. It considers two ways of rephrasing the question: What do our personal pronouns and proper names refer to? and What sorts of beings think our thoughts (...) and perform our actions? The question is distinguished from the question of personal identity over time and from the mind‐body problem. It is then argued that thinking about personal identity without considering what we are leads to metaphysical trouble. (shrink)No categories
- Was Jekyll Hyde?Eric T.Olson -2003 -Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2):328-348.Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split‐personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split‐personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest (...) that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals. (shrink)
- Constitution.Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter is about the view that we are material things constituted by organisms; this view is advocated by Baker, Shoemaker, and others. Each of us is made of the same matter as an organism, but our persistence conditions or essential properties preclude our being organisms ourselves. This goes together with the general view that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once: constitutionalism. Constitutionalism is supported by arguments involving the persistence of artifacts. It is argued, (...) however, that the view faces the thinking‐animal problem, that it rules out any principled account of when one thing constitutes another, that it cannot explain why our boundaries lie where they do, and that it conflicts with a popular claim about synchronic identity. (shrink)No categories
- Identity, personal identity, and the self, by John Perry.Eric T.Olson -2006 -European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3):434–437.
- Lowe's Non-Cartesian Dualism.Eric T.Olson -2022 - In Mirosław Szatkowski,E. J. Lowe and Ontology. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 225-238.E. J. Lowe’s ‘non-Cartesian dualism’ is the widely held view that we and other thinking things are not organisms, but things materially coinciding with or constituted by them. Lowe added to this the claim that we have no parts. This further claim faces obvious and grave objections. His claim (shared by Baker and others) that we have our physical properties only derivatively may seem to offer an answer to these objections. But it introduces new problems, and appears to reduce Lowe’s (...) view to Cartesian dualism. (shrink)Export citation Bookmark
- Nihilism.Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter examines the view that we do not exist because there are no human thinkers: nihilism. Nihilism is defended against the charge that it is an absurd denial of the obvious, or that it is self‐refuting. Attempts by Kant and others, such as Russell, Unger, and Wittgenstein, to defeat nihilism by showing that thought requires a thinker are examined and found wanting. Attention then turns to attempts to paraphrase statements apparently about people into terms compatible with nihilism. Although this (...) is difficult because nihilists will want to deny the existence of any composite objects, no conclusive objections to the project are found. It is then argued that nihilism, like solipsism, is depressing, and that someone who accepted it consistently would appear to deprive herself of any reasons for action. (shrink)No categories
- Souls.Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter is about the view that we are simple immaterial substances–immaterialism–and related views. It is claimed to be best supported by the difficulty of saying what material things we could be. For instance, the paradox of increase threatens to show that nothing can have different parts at different times, and materialists can solve it only at considerable cost. Immaterialism is then shown to face grave problems concerning the relation of souls to material things. Compound dualism, Swinburne's view that each (...) of us is composed of an immaterial soul and a material body, is shown to face difficulties in addition to those of immaterialism. The Thomistic view that we are hylomorphic compounds is shown to combine the problems of compound dualism with those of the bundle view. The views of Chisholm and Lowe that we are simple material things are then critically discussed. (shrink)No categories
- Animals.Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter examines animalism, the view that we are biological organisms. It is based on the claim that human organisms think just as we do. This implies that if I am not an organism, I am one of at least two thinkers of my thoughts, making it hard to see how I could know that I am the nonanimal thinker: the thinking-animal problem. Some proposed solutions are critically examined, notably Shoemaker's claim that human organisms cannot think and Noonan's account of (...) how we might know that we are not the animals thinking our thoughts. Familiar objections to animalism are then reviewed, such as its implication that personal identity does not consist in psychological continuity. It is argued that these objections are weak and that more serious worries lie elsewhere. (shrink)No categories
- What Now?Eric T.Olson -2007 - InWhat are we? Oxford University Press.This chapter proposes that animalism, the temporal‐parts view, and nihilism are the best accounts of what we are. It then takes up metaphysical objections to animalism hinted at earlier. It is proposed that animalists answer them by endorsing a sparse ontology of material objects. It is then argued that we can work out what we are by discovering when composition occurs: if composition is universal, we are temporal parts of animals; if there is no composition, we do not exist; and (...) intermediate theories of composition lead almost inevitably to animalism. Finally, the view that there is no theory of composition‐‐that composition is brute‐‐is claimed to rule out any good account of what we are. (shrink)No categories
- Human atoms.Eric T.Olson -1998 -Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (3):396-406.In this paper I shall explore a novel alternative to these familiar views. In his recent book Sub ects of Ex erience, E. J. Lowe argues, as many others have done before, that you and I are not animals. It follows from this, he says, that we must be simple substances without parts. That may sound like Cartesian dualism. But Lowe is no Cartesian. He argues from premises that many present-day materialists accept. And he claims that our being mereologically simple (...) is consistent with our having such paradigmatically physical properties as being six feet tall and weighing 160 pounds. You and I, he claims, are mereological atoms shaped like human beings. (shrink)
- 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.
- The Human Animal. Personal identity without psychology.Eric T.Olson -1997 -Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 192 (1):112-113.
- Immanent causation and life after death.Eric T.Olson -2016 - In Georg Gasser,Personal Identity and Resurrection: How Do We Survive Our Death? Routledge. pp. 51-66.No categories
- The Human Animal.Tamar Szabo Gendler &Eric T.Olson -1999 -Philosophical Review 108 (1):112.The Human Animal is an extended defense of what its author calls the Biological Approach to personal identity: that you and I are human animals, and that the identity conditions under which we endure are those which apply to us as biological organisms. The somewhat surprising corollary of this view is that no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal—and thus for us—to persist through time. In challenging the hegemony of Psychological Approaches to personal (...) identity,Olson offers a number of inventive and original arguments which are certain to evoke discussion and debate. (shrink)
- The Problem of People and Their Matter.Eric T.Olson -2022 -TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (2).If I am a material thing, there would seem to be such an entity as the matter now making me up. In that case the matter and I must be either one thing or two. This creates an awkward dilemma. If we’re one thing, then I have existed for billions of years and I am human only momentarily. But if we’re two, then my matter would seem to be a second person. Dean Zimmerman and others take the repugnance of these (...) alternatives to show that I’m not a material thing, but rather an immaterial one. This paper explores a way of avoiding the dilemma without giving up materialism: there is no such entity as the matter making me up, but only a lot of particles. (shrink)No categories
- Interview, in A. Steglich-Petersen, ed., <u>Metaphysics: 5 Questions</u>.Eric T.Olson -2010 - In Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen,Metaphysics: 5 Questions. Automatic Press. pp. 75-84.Export citation Bookmark
- (1 other version)Warum wir Tiere sind.Eric T.Olson -2003 - In Klaus Petrus,On Human Persons. Heusenstamm Nr Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. pp. 11-22.No categories
- Evil, Political Violence, and Forgiveness: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card.Todd Calder,Claudia Card,Ann Cudd,Eric Kraemer,Alice MacLachlan,Sarah Clark Miller,María Pía Lara,Robin May Schott,Laurence Thomas &Lynne Tirrell -2009 - Lexington Books.Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)
- Material coincidence and the indiscernibility problem.Eric T.Olson -2001 -Philosophical Quarterly 51 (204):337-355.It is often said that the same particles can simultaneously make up two or more material objects that differ in kind and in their mental, biological, and other qualitative properties. Others wonder how objects made of the same parts in the same arrangement and surroundings could differ in these ways. I clarify this worry and show that attempts to dismiss or solve it miss its point. At most one can argue that it is a problem we can live with.
- Consciousness and persons: Unity and identity, Michael Tye. Cambridge, ma, and London, uk.Eric T.Olson -2006 -Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2):500–503.There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.
- Why I have no hands.Eric T.Olson -1995 -Theoria 61 (2):182-197.Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for 'person'.
- The Extended Self.Eric T.Olson -2011 -Minds and Machines 21 (4):481-495.The extended-mind thesis says that mental states can extend beyond one’s skin. Clark and Chalmers infer from this that the subjects of such states also extend beyond their skin: the extended-self thesis. The paper asks what exactly the extended-self thesis says, whether it really does follow from the extended-mind thesis, and what it would mean if it were true. It concludes that the extended-self thesis is unattractive, and does not follow from the extended mind unless thinking beings are literally bundles (...) of mental states. (shrink)
- Ethics and the generous ontology.Eric T.Olson -2010 -Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (4):259-270.According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. (...) Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us. (shrink)
- Self: Personal Identity.Eric T.Olson -2009 - In William P. Banks,Encyclopedia of Consciousness. Elsevier. pp. 301-312.Personal identity deals with the many philosophical questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being people. The most frequently discussed is what it takes for a person to persist through time. Many philosophers say that we persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Others say that our persistence is determined by brute physical facts, and psychology is irrelevant. In choosing among these answers we must consider not only what they imply about who is who in particular cases, both real (...) and imaginary, but also their implications about our metaphysical nature in general. (shrink)Export citation Bookmark
- The rate of time's passage.Eric T.Olson -2009 -Analysis 69 (1):3-9.Many philosophers say that time involves a kind of passage that distinguishes it from space. A traditional objection is that this passage would have to occur at some rate, yet we cannot say what the rate would be. The paper argues that the real problem with time’s passage is different: time would have to pass at one second per second, yet this is not a rate of change. This appears to refute decisively not only the view that time passes, but (...) any tensed theory of time. (shrink)
- Précis of the human animal.EricOlson -2008 -Abstracta 4 (S1):5-7.
- Animalism and the Remnant-Person Problem.Eric T.Olson -2015 - In João Fonseca & Jorge Gonçalves,Philosophical Perspectives on the Self. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 21-40.
- The Metaphysical Implications of Conjoined Twinning.Eric T.Olson -2014 -Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):24-40.Conjoined twinning is said to show that the number of human people—the number of us—can differ from the number of human organisms, and hence that we are not organisms. The paper shows that these arguments either assume the point at issue, rely on dubious and undefended assumptions, or add nothing to more familiar arguments for the same conclusion.
- Temporal parts and timeless parthood.Eric T.Olson -2006 -Noûs 40 (4):738–752.What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must (...) be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly. (shrink)
- Narrative and persistence.Eric T.Olson &Karsten Witt -2019 -Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3):419-434.ABSTRACTMany philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accounts in ways that deprive them of their appeal.
- There is no problem of the self.Eric T.Olson -1998 -Journal of Consciousness Studies 5 (5-6):645-657.Because there is no agreed use of the term 'self', or characteristic features or even paradigm cases of selves, there is no idea of "the self" to figure in philosophical problems. The term leads to troubles otherwise avoidable; and because legitimate discussions under the heading of 'self' are really about other things, it is gratuitous. I propose that we stop speaking of selves.
- Against Person Essentialism.Eric T.Olson &Karsten Witt -2020 -Mind 129 (515):715-735.It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.No categories
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