Hylomorphism and Persons in Odd Situations

動物權益問題

Especially after a secular Enlightenment focused on the human capacity for rationality and individual self-determination, the developed West has had what might be described as a ‘turn to the head.’ This general orientation operates with the assumption that what ultimately matters about human person can be found in a single organ — the brain — with some thinkers going so far as to claim that human persons are brains. All other aspects of the body, on this view, are to be understood as so much baggage, which can be discarded as accidental to who we really are.But this view has run into puzzles and problems in recent years, particularly from challenges brought by philosophy of mind. For starters, if human persons are identical with our brains, then the classic thought experiments about brain transplants and downloads force us into radically counter-intuitive positions about personal identity. Furthermore, thinkers like Thomas Nagel and Alva Noe have argued that a fully-functioning, healthy brain is simply an inadequate explanation for many fundamental aspects of human existence, including consciousness. Nagel concludes that the materialist account of consciousness fails, and Noe claims that human consciousness must be understood as an “embodied” function of the human organism, holistically considered.The broadly-understood traditions of Catholicism and Islam are well placed to build on these insights and resist the secular ‘turn to the head.’ In some ways, Islam is better positioned than Catholicism, having explicitly resisted the secular Enlightenment on many fronts, and developed an understanding of the human person which rejects its reduction to the brain. Both traditions are largely indebted to the moral anthropology of Aristotle, who argued that human persons are substances of a rational and relational nature — constituted by our being a certain kind of animal or organism.This view not only obviously resists the reduction of the human person to the brain, but implies that one may be a human person even without a (functioning) brain. The United States has seen several recent high profile cases of human animals, functioning with homeostasis, who were described as “brain dead.” Though our Western secular law pushes towards describing brain death as “actual death”, two of these supposedly dead individuals were able to gestate prenatal children—and one actually brought a healthy baby boy to birth. Human persons — both before they have brains and (sometimes) when their brains are damaged or destroyed — maintain homeostasis as holistically-considered organisms, not through a single organ.This moral anthropology has serious and far-reaching and critical implications for contemporary neuroscience’s reduction of the human person to the human brain. Indeed, this moment of uncertainly for those who have until now accepted the ‘turn to the head’ provide both Catholicism and Islam the opportunity to rejoin contemporary bioethical debates in a constructively critical way. These traditions offer an understanding of the human person which avoids the puzzles and problems of the contemporary secular discourse.

Should Christians support the view that one’s psychological continuity is the main criterion of personal identity? Is the continuity of one’s brain or memory states necessary and sufficient for the identicalness of the person? This paper investigates the plausibility of the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, which holds that the criterion of personal identity is certain psychological continuity between persons existing at different times. I argue that the psychological continuity theory in its various forms suffers from interminable problems. Then, I introduce an alternate account of personal identity, according to which personal identity is not further analyzable in terms of qualitative properties (“suchnesses”) of persons. Rather, persons are individuated by their primitive thisnesses (haecceities), which are nonqualitative properties of immaterial substances (or souls). This alternate conception of personal identity would be of particular relevance to those who believe in the immortality of the soul and are looking for a nonphysicalist account of personal identity.

This chapter, armed with a fully developed phasalist metaphysics, turns to the thorny but fascinating subject of personal ontology and personal identity. The chapter argues that animalism, the view that human people are numerically identical to human animals or organisms, is the theory of personal ontology which fits best with the author’s phasalist metaphysics and his way of defending that metaphysics. The chapter also derives a broadly spatiotemporal criterion of personal identity from the more general criterion of identity that the author defends in Chapter 2. Having done these things, the author applies the resulting phasalist view of the human person to three major questions about the metaphysics of human people. When does a human person begin to exist? When does a human person cease to exist? And what happens to a human person in brain transplant cases? The author draws out the implications of his phasalist metaphysics for each of these questions and argues that those implications are plausible.

Interactions that animals experience can have a significant influence on their health and welfare. These interactions can occur between animals themselves, but also between animals and keepers, and animals and the public. Human and non-human animals come into contact with each other in a variety of settings, and wherever there is contact there is the opportunity for interaction to take place. Interaction with companion animals are well known, but human–animal interaction (HAR) (Hosey, 2008) also occurs in the context of farms (Hemsworth and Gonyou, 1997; Hemsworth, 2003), laboratories (Chang and Hart, 2002), zoos (Kreger and Mench, 1995) and even the wild (e.g. Cassini, 2001). This project proposes a permanent monitoring scheme to record animal-human interactions and animal-animal interactions in zoos. This will be accompanied by a survey of animal personality for welfare, husbandry, breeding programs and reintroduction purposes. The pilot project is currently based on direct monitoring of animal behaviour, use of time lapse cameras and animal personality questionnaires completed by experienced keepers. The goal of this project is to create a network between zoos to explore the aforementioned interactions to produce husbandry protocols and explore personality and behavioural traits in multiple species. We present provisional data regarding polar bear (Fasano Zoosafari, Italy), Sumatran tigers, Amur tigers and Asiatic lion (ZSL London and Whipsnade zoo) interactions with humans and conspecifics. This data is collected across a broad range of environmental conditions and outlines the monitoring protocols developed to collect this data. The first year data show the great adaptability of these species to ex situ environments, low or absent negative impact of visitors’ presence and the relevance of individual personality in these interactions.

The concept of the person, and the notion that the latter is an entity separate and distinct from other persons, has persisted as one of the more secure "givens" of philosophical thought. We have very little difficulty, in observer language, in pointing to a person, describing his or her attributes, distinguishing him or her from other persons, etc. Likewise, it is ordinarily not much of a problem to subjectively experience, both sensorially and conceptually, the self - that is, to distinguish in agent language "my person" from the rest of the universe. The second of these two perspectives on the person defines the "I," "ego," or "identity." Several recent developments in experimental psychology and brain science - while not defeating the ordinary notion of the person on the merits of data per se - at least force a re-thinking of tacit assumptions basic to our sense of the concepts of both the person and personal identity. In this paper, I would like to show how the concept of the person needs revision, and at the same time to raise some objections to Shaffer's (1977) account of the consequences of brain bisection and brain transplant with respect to the fate of the person and his identity.

The animalist view of personal identity, according to which we human persons are identical to animals, is arguably the simplest view of the relationship between human persons and animals. But animalism faces a serious challenge from the possibility of brain transplants. This chapter develops, on behalf of animalism, a new way of modeling such cases. The model is developed by analogy with situations of environmentally determined reference shift familiar from the literature on externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. The resulting externalist animalist model is put to work in describing a range of variant cases and in accounting for certain anti-animalist intuitions. In the final section some wider consequences are elucidated, concerning the extrinsic nature of thought, and the coherence, within a broadly materialist framework, of disembodied consciousness.

One aspect of the problem of personal identity is considered in this article. In the introduction, the main frame of die problem is stated. After the exposition of the logically possible case of (whole) brain transplantation and the exposition of psychological criterion of personal identity, we introduce the problem of neuron exchange, one by one. Neurons are pulled out from one brain of a certain person, one by one, and they are implemented into the another personYs brain. At the end of this operation, all the neurons which were constitutive of the brain of the person A are assembled again in the head of the person B. The question is who is the person who survives and retains its personal identity? Contrary to John Robinson, I argue that the person who survives and retains identity is the person whose brain received the neurons and not the person from whom the neurons were pulled out. The main reason is the very way in which the neuron change took place.

In 2019, David Hershenov argued for a set of three connected claims in this journal [1].First, any psychological account of what it is to be a human person (i.e. a view denying that human persons are identical to human animals), need not and in fact should not formulate a definition of death distinct from the merely biological definitions of death typically offered for human animals [2][3][4].Second, a distinct criterion for the deaths of human persons and human animals is also unnecessary as a biological criterion is capable of playing the role for both.Finally, accepting distinct conditions for ceasing to exist is sufficient to ground distinct accounts of the deaths of human persons and human animals.If Hershenov is correct, what appear to be important and significant disagreements in bieothics (e.g., whole brain theorists vs. higher brain theorists; animalists vs. psychological essentialists) are otiose.Hershenov's arguments are thus worth examining.I argue in what follows that only the third claim withstands critical scrutiny.It may help to start with the third claim to begin to understand Hershenov's position.This claim is clearly the least controversial of the set.The difference in conditions for ceasing to exist between person and animal is required by the psychological theorist's belief that human persons have certain mental capacities essentially, while human animals do not.If this is right, then a human person might go out of existence, but the human animal that previously overlapped with that person would remain.And this possibility entails a difference in the conditions sufficient for ceasing to exist.In such a case, the going out of existence of the human person occurs before the going out of existence of the human animal.Consider now the first claim that only a biological definition of death is required, even if one is a psychological theorist.While the correct definition of death is of course not a settled matter, assume that a proponent of the psychological account

Brain transplantation and personal identity Get access Roland Puccetti Roland Puccetti University of Singapore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Analysis, Volume 29, Issue 3, January 1969, Pages 65–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/29.3.65 Published: 01 January 1969

Brain transplantation and personal identity Get access Roland Puccetti Roland Puccetti University of Singapore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Analysis, Volume 29, Issue 3, January 1969, Pages 65–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/29.3.65 Published: 01 January 1969

Frankenstein has been a focal point for critical discussions of Romantic life science for more than a generation. James Rieger's dismissal of Shelley's science as "switched-on magic" and "souped-up alchemy" (xxvii) must have seemed inadequate almost as soon as he uttered it in 1974

Rethinking emotion as a natural kind: Correctives from Spinoza and hierarchical homology

Sometimes in philosophy one view engenders another. If you hold the first, chances are you hold the second. But it’s not always because the first entails the second. Sometimes the tie is less clear, less clean. One such tie is between substance dualism and anti-criterialism. Substance dualism is the view that people are, at least in part, immaterial mental substances. Anti-criterialism is the view that there is no criterion of personal identity through time. Most philosophers who hold the first view also hold the second. In fact, many philosophers just assume that substance dualists ought to, or perhaps even have to, accept anti-criterialism. But I aim to show that this assumption is baseless. Substance dualism doesn’t entail, suggest, support, or in any way motivate anti-criterialism, and anti-criterialism confers no benefit on dualism. Substance dualists have no special reason—and, indeed, no good reason at all—to accept anti-criterialism. Or so I shall argue. My aim isn’t to defend substance dualism, nor is it to attack anti-criterialism. My aim is to show that, contrary to a long-standing trend, dualists needn’t be anti-criterialists. Nor, as it will turn out, should they be.

Using a brain transplant paradigm (BT), we examined the role of culture and status (privileged group membership) on beliefs about social and personal identity among Indians (Brahmins and Dalits, N = 202) and American participants (N = 114). Participants were presented a vignette about a hypothetical BT between members of two different ethnic groups and asked the following two questions: (a) whether a BT would change how the recipient would act; (b) whether the BT would change the social identity of the recipient. Americans believed that the BT recipient would act as the ethnicity of the donor. By contrast, Brahmin participants believed that a Brahmin recipient of a Dalit (formerly treated as "untouchables") brain would act like a Dalit but a Dalit who received a BT from a Brahmin would not act like a Brahmin. Both Americans and Indians believed that the social identity (the caste, race or ethnic identity) of a person would not be changed by a brain transplant. The role of culture and social status in affecting various implicit theories of identities are discussed.