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Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

E. J. Lowe
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Are persons substances or modes? (The terminology may seem archaic, but the issue is a live one.) Two currently dominant views may be characterized as giving the following rival answers to this question. According to the first view, persons are just biological substances. According to the second, persons are psychological modes of substances which, as far as human beings are concerned, happen to be biological substances, but which could in principle be non-biological. There is, however, also a third possible answer, and this is that persons are psychological substances. Such a view is inevitably associated with the name of Descartes, and this helps to explain its current unpopularity, since substantial dualism of his sort is now widely rejected as ‘unscientific’. But one may, as I hope to show, espouse the view that persons are psychological substances without endorsing Cartesianism. This is because one may reject certain features of Descartes's conception of substance. Consequently, one may also espouse a version of substantial dualism which is distinctly non-Cartesian. One may hold that a person, being a psychological substance, is an entity distinct from the biological substance that is (in the human case) his or her body, and yet still be prepared to ascribe corporeal characteristics to this psychological substance. By this account, a human person is to be thought of neither as a non-corporeal mental substance (a Cartesian mind), nor as the product of a mysterious ‘union’ between such a substance and a physical, biological substance (a Cartesian animal body). This is not to deny that the mind—body problem is a serious and difficult one, but it is to imply that there is a version of substantial dualism which does not involve regarding the ‘mind’ as a distinct substance in its own right.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 87 - 107
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 Such a view has close affinities with that advanced by P. F. Strawson, in his Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), Ch. 3.Google Scholar

2 See further my chapter on ‘Substance’, in Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1988), 255–78Google Scholar. ‘Particular’ is Strawson's term. The term ‘continuant’ was coined by W. E. Johnson: see his Logic, Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), Ch. VII.Google Scholar

3 See, e.g. Code, Alan, ‘Aristotle: Essence and Accident’, in Grandy, R. E. and Warner, R. (eds), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and Frede, Michael, ‘Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics’, in his Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).Google Scholar

4 See Wilkerson, T. E., ‘Natural Kinds’, Philosophy 63, No. 243 (01 1988), 29–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See Wiggins, David, Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 187.Google Scholar

6 Wiggins himself (ibid. 174f.) gravitates towards the first horn of this apparent dilemma. Another recent author who gravitates towards the anthropocentric position is Kathleen Wilkes: see her Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 97ff., 230ff.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Wiggins, , Sameness and Substance, 202.Google Scholar

8 Cf. Wiggins, ibid. 203.

9 Cf. Wiggins, ibid.

10 For a view of personhood along these lines, see Dennett, Daniel C., ‘Conditions of Personhood’, in his Brainstorms (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979)Google Scholar. I criticize this sort of approach in my Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 112–18Google Scholar. Thus I agree with Wiggins that persons constitute a real rather than a merely nominal kind, but differ from him in denying that the kind in question is a biological one.

11 David Wiggins challenges this view in his Sameness and Substance, 174–5Google Scholar. It has of course also been challenged, if more obliquely, by John Searle, most recently in his ‘Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?’, Scientific American 262 (01 1990), 20–5Google Scholar. But I find neither challenge convincing: see my Kinds of Being, 111.Google Scholar

12 Wiggins would deny this, on the grounds that both schemes are supposedly dominated by the genus animal. Thus he writes: ‘Cross-classifications that are resolved under a higher sort do not ultimately disturb a system of natural kinds. It is always (say) animals that are under study; and different classifications will not import different identity or persistence conditions for particular animals’ (Sameness and Substance, 204Google Scholar). This seems to presume that all animals, of whatever kind, are governed by the same persistence conditions. But that is patently false, at least if one means by the ‘persistence conditions’ for a given kind of animals the range of changes which, as a matter of natural law, members of that kind can undergo. Of course, it may be conceptually possible for an individual member of one animal kind to survive a transmutation which renders it a member of another kind governed by persistence conditions different from those of the first. But the bare logical possibility of such fairy-tale transmogrifications obviously does nothing to lessen the tension between our two supposed taxonomic schemes, conceived as contributions to empirical biological science.

13 I raise other objections against it in my Kinds of Being, 108–21.Google Scholar

14 See Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book I, Part IV, Sect. VI, 252.Google Scholar

15 See Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Book II, Ch. XXVII, Sect. 9. Of course, Locke thought that all sortal terms denote merely nominal kinds, so that his classification of ‘person’ as a nominal kind term reflects no special treatment of it.

16 See further my review of Noonan, Harold W.'s Personal Identity in Mind 99 (1990), 477–9.Google Scholar

17 Locke, , Essay, Book II, Ch. XXVII, Sect. 2.Google Scholar

18 See Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), Part III.Google Scholar

19 Cf. Hume, , Treatise, 261Google Scholar: ‘the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it a system of different perceptions … which are link'd together by the relation of cause and effect’.

20 See Strawson, , Individuals, Ch. 3.Google Scholar

21 See further my Kinds of Being, 113–14, 132–33.Google Scholar

22 See Peacocke, Christopher, Sense and Content: Experience, Thought and their Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 176ff.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. 177.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 See Davidson, Donald, ‘The Individuation of Events’, in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar. For an exposure of the defect, see my ‘Impredicative Identity Criteria and Davidson's Criterion of Event Identity’, Analysis 49 (1989), 178–81.Google Scholar

27 Cf. Hume, , Treatise, 233, 634.Google Scholar

28 This has been disputed recently by Andrew Brennan, in his ‘Fragmented Selves and the Problem of Ownership’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XC (1989/1990), 143–58Google Scholar. He cites in his support clinical cases of patients suffering from Korsakov's syndrome, which involves severe amnesia. However, my thesis is not an empirical one, vulnerable to the alleged findings of such psychiatric case studies, but rather a logico-metaphysical one which imposes an a priori constraint on what could count as an experience or as evidence for the occurrence of one.

29 See Davidson, , Essays on Actions and Events, 217.Google Scholar

30 This elaborates and strengthens an argument to be found in my Kinds of Being, 131–33.Google Scholar

31 Cf. Wilkes, , Real People, Ch. 5.Google Scholar

32 See Réné Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part I, Sect. 53.

33 For criticism of this suggestion, see my Kinds of Being, 119–20.Google Scholar

34 I am grateful to audiences at the Universities of Durham, Oxford, Sheffield, and York for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.