The ontology of the Embodied Person View

Abstract

In this paper I argue in favor of an account of personal identity based on the Embodied Person View (EP) advocated by Derek Parfit.1 The main focus is to evaluate how well this view fares as an account of personal ontology. Since EP as presented in We Are Not Human Beings 1) is vaguely formulated in the sense that it makes room for further explicating 2) has received relevant criticism that needs to be met for it to sustain its strength, I attempt to explicate and recast the view in a way that hopefully enables it to answer some of the objections made against it. There are three areas of criticism: the first concerns EP's alleged commitment to Thinking Subject Minimalism and the problems that follow from it, the second concerns identity over time and the last concerns the ontology of EP. Since the main focus of this paper is personal ontology, the most important objections are those of the first and last category. However, I attempt to answer the other objections here as well since the view’s strength partly depends on its consequences in other aspects of personal identity. I argue that the ontological objections can be resolved by adopting an ontology of temporal parts,2 and the kind of temporal parts ontology examined for this purpose is the stage view. In the last section of the paper I endeavour to draw conclusions regarding the strength of the revisioned version of EP in light of the foregoing discussion. Now for some opening clarifications. Since there are several ways of defining “person”, no single introductory definition is offered here; instead I try to make explicit throughout the text which one is posited and by whom. A second reason to this is that defining “person” is the problem of personhood, and not that of personal ontology, and I try to avoid getting too enmeshed in the wrong questions.3 Another important distinction to note before moving on is that this paper covers numerical identity and not qualitative identity.4 Since questions about persistence is important to the topic, this needs to be spelled out. In other words, what I am after when discussing identity over time is not whether you and your future self are qualitatively identical. The kind of identity relevant to this paper is the numerical identity that holds between you and some future self of yours.