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Persons and the metaphysics of resurrection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2007

LYNNE RUDDER BAKER
LYNNE RUDDER BAKER
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Bartlett Hall 352, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
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Abstract

Theories of the human person differ greatly in their ability to underwrite a metaphysics of resurrection. This paper compares and contrasts a number of such views in light of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. In a Christian framework, resurrection requires that the same person who exists on earth also exists in an afterlife, that a post-mortem person be embodied, and that the existence of a post-mortem person is brought about by a miracle. According to my view of persons (the constitution view), a human person is constituted by – but not identical to – a human organism. A person has a first-person perspective essentially, and an organism has interrelated biological functions essentially. I shall argue for the superiority the constitution view as a metaphysical basis for resurrection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 333 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

Notes

1. René Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald A. Cress (tr.) (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1979), 19.

2. Peter van Inwagen has argued that many philosophical uses of ‘her body’ are nonsensical. ‘Philosophers and the words “human body”’, in Peter van Inwagen (ed.) Time and Cause (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 283–299. Tye, Michael offers a rebuttal in ‘In defense of the words “human body”’, Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980), 177–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I take a human organism to be a kind of body. Wherever I use the term ‘human body,’ the reader may substitute the term ‘human organism’. My concern is with the relation between human persons and human organisms (i.e. human bodies).

3. E.g. John Perry says that ‘human being’ ‘is a purely biological notion; John Perry ‘The importance of being identical’, in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.) The Identities of Persons (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1976), 70.

4. E.g. Mark Johnston says: ‘“[H]uman being” names a partly psychological kind, whereas “human organism” … names a purely biological kind’; Johnston, Mark ‘Human beings’, Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987), 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. I give an account of the conditions under which something has a first-person perspective in Lynne Rudder Baker Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

6. For details on the idea of a rudimentary first-person perspective, as well as a defence of the idea based on evidence from developmental psychology, see Baker, Lynne Rudder ‘When does a person begin?’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 22 (2005), 25–48CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

7. Unlike David Wiggins, I do not distinguish between an animal and an animal body. In David Wiggins Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 187, he says, ‘[M]y claim is that by person we mean a certain sort of animal.’ Then, he distinguishes the animal (that I supposedly am) from the body (that supposedly constitutes it). On the other hand, I think that an animal is (identical to) a body of a special self-sustaining and self-organizing sort, and I distinguish the animal/body from the person. Also, I take an animal to be a member of its species whether it is alive or dead. How could an animal lose species-membership on dying? It simply becomes a dead member of its species. See Fred Feldman Confrontations with the Reaper (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1992).

8. ‘Unity without identity: a new look at material constitution’, in Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein (eds) New Directions in Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23, (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1999), 144–165. For a related view, see Wiggins, Sameness and Substance.

9. Here I am not talking about entities that are human organisms or persons derivatively. An entity x has F derivatively only if x has F in virtue of its constitution-relations. See Baker Persons and Bodies, ch. 2.

10. For detailed arguments against the view that Discobolus and that piece of bronze that constituted it are identical (contingently or necessarily), see Baker, Lynne Rudder ‘Why constitution is not identity’, The Journal of Philosophy, 94 (1997), 599–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Moreover, since organisms do not lose their membership in their species at death, a human body remains a human body whether alive or dead. In an ordinary, non-violent death, one and the same human body persists through the change: it is first alive, and then it is dead.

12. Richard Swinburne The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 146.

13. This is a suggestion of David Hershenov's. Hershenov defends a reassembly conception of resurrection.

14. But see Hershenov, David B. ‘The metaphysical problem of intermittent existence and the possibility of resurrection’, Faith and Philosophy, 20 (2003), 89–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his ‘Van Inwagen, Zimmerman, and the materialist conception of resurrection’, Religious Studies, 38 (2002), 11–19.

15. Inwagen, Peter van ‘The possibility of resurrection’, in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 9 (1978)Google Scholar, repr. in Paul Edwards (ed.) Immortality (New York NY: Macmillan, 1992), 242–246.

16. Zimmerman, Dean ‘The compatibility of materialism and survival: the “falling elevator” model’, Faith and Philosophy, 16 (1999), 194–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Van Inwagen ‘The possibility of resurrection’.

17. Although I am not considering four-dimensionalism here, a four-dimensionalist may hold that a single person could have corruptible temporal parts during part of her existence and incorruptible temporal parts during another part of her existence. Although so far, your temporal parts are all corruptible, after your death, God could make an incorruptible body and freely decree it to be a temporal part of your body. Then, in the sense that a four-dimensionalist construes ‘same body’ – i.e. as being a sequence of temporal parts – you would have (or rather, be) the same body in the resurrection that you have now. Perhaps so, but there are other reasons beyond the scope of this paper for Christians to reject four-dimensionalism.

18. Caroline Walker Bynum The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), 260.

19. D. M. MacKay ‘Brain science and the soul’, in Richard L. Gregory (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 724–725.

20. John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 163.

21. ibid., 163.

22. Stephen T. Davis Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), 119–121.

23. The idea of haecceity we find in Duns Scotus seems to offer another possibility: God knows our haecceities in this life, but we do not.

24. This paper was presented as a plenary address at the Society of Christian Philosophers meeting at San Diego University in February, 2006. I am very grateful to the SCP and to Gareth B. Matthews and David B. Hershenov for reading drafts of this paper and for making helpful comments.