Persons — What Philosophers Say about You

541 Pages·2003·4.93 MB·English

by  Warren Bourgeois

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Persons—What Philosophers
Say About You
2nd Edition
Warren Bourgeois
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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bourgeois, Verne Warren, 1947-
Persons : what philosophers say about you
2nd ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88920-379-2
1. Persons—History. 2. Persons. I. Title.
BD450.B68 2003 128 C2001-903200-5
© 2003 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover design by Jane Grossett of Mindpage Design,
based on Giorgio de Chirico’s The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914.
© Estate of Giorgio de Chirico/SODRAC (Montreal) 2003.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material
used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and
omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
嘷⬁
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Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Introduction
Where I Am Coming From . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part 1: Philosophical Background
Chapter 1
The Nature of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Chapter 2
So Who Cares? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Part 2: Ancient Philosophers’ Views on Persons
Chapter 3
Persons in Ancient Greece and Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Chapter 4
The Mediaevals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Part 3: Modern Philosophers’ Views on Persons
Chapter 5
The Renaissance and the Early Moderns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Chapter 6
More Moderns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
iii
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iv
Persons–
Chapter 7
What
Yet More Moderns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Philoso-
phers Say
Part 4: Contemporary Philosophers’ Views on Persons
About You
Chapter 8
Our Contemporaries (or Almost) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Chapter 9
Analytic Founding Fathers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Chapter 10
More Contemporary Classics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Chapter 11
Wiggins and Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Chapter 12
Nozick’s Self-Makers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
Chapter 13
Parfit: The Oxford Buddhist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Chapter 14
The Nagelian Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Part 5: My Suggestions for Ways to See Ourselves
Chapter 15
Collecting Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Chapter 16
A Bourgeois Concept of a Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Chapter 17
Applications of My Concept of a Person. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
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Acknowledgments
am grateful to Kwantlen College for awarding me educational leave in
I1989-90, during which the first draft of this book was written. I am
also grateful to the University of British Columbia for making me a
research associate in the Department of Philosophy during my leave. I
have benefited greatly from discussions with members of the philosophy
department, in particular, professors Richard Sikora, Samuel Coval,
Michael Phillips, and Donald Brown. Jonathan Katz at Kwantlen Uni-
versity College, Leonard Angel at Douglas College, Michael Stack at the
University of Manitoba, and Ray Jennings at Simon Fraser University
offered insightful suggestions about persons. Papers adumbrating the
theory developed here were read to two colloquia of the departments of
philosophy of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
University. Sandra Woolfrey’s many comments made this a much more
accessible book, and I benefited from the criticisms of unnamed review-
ers. I would like to have responded to all my colleagues’ questions, but I
have come to appreciate the saying that one never completes a book but
just stops writing. In any case, I have reached the natural limits of the
second edition of my first volume on this subject.
The first edition of this book was published with the help of a
grant from the Canada Council.
v
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INTRODUCTION
Where I Am Coming From
Daphne’s tragedy: Radical, personal change
y topics—the nature of persons and personal identity—are
Mfor Daphne shot through with significance. Daphne is not
the real name of the person who inspired this book but a name I will
use here. I choose the name since Daphne in Greek mythology suffers
a somewhat parallel tragedy. Daphne was a brilliant philosopher
teaching at the University of British Columbia where I was on a post-
doctoral fellowship. We became inseparable. In the next five years, we
came to know each other’s hearts and minds so well that we could
often dispense with spoken communication. We were married in
August of 1985. In October of that year, Daphne suffered a massive
attack of multiple sclerosis. After nearly a year of attacks and remis-
sions, in August 1986, Daphne passed for the last time beneath the
dark archway that separates those who can intelligibly express their
wishes from those who cannot.
What people are and what changes a person can survive had long
been metaphysical concerns of mine. They suddenly appeared to me
as practical questions of great moral import. Here, I offer all-too-
brief expositions of some of the great philosophers of the Western
philosophical tradition, including some of our contemporaries, to
reveal some of the sources of our cultural heritage for dealing with
1
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2
Persons–
what I witnessed and what Daphne suffered. No attempt is made here,
What
however, to deal with the rich traditions of the Orient. My own
Philoso-
phers Say answers to the questions that forced themselves so roughly to the
About You forefront of my philosophical thought are rooted in the past, but, I
hope, grow beyond it to become applicable to our current deeds.
Through my theory of persons, it is at least possible that one
might suffer radical change and still be a person—although not the
same person one once was. It is also possible that one might be still
a human being but no longer a person at all. Before I work through
others’ theories of persons, and my own, however, I will explain in fur-
ther detail what happened to Daphne. This is what I am trying,
through my thought, to absorb into my life.
Multiple sclerosis is a disease that can take many forms. Some
suffer attacks infrequently with long periods of remission. At another
extreme, some steadily and quickly worsen, losing physical or mental
abilities, perhaps both. At first it was not clear how Daphne’s case
would progress. From the start, however, she was very different from
the way she had been just prior to that massive attack in October
1985.
Initially, peculiar bodily changes and total exhaustion beset
Daphne. She was unable to carry on her life in a normal way. At the
beginning, however, neither she nor I could quite believe that this
condition would continue. Even though she had already lost the pitch
of her intellectual abilities, we assumed that she would return to what
for her was normal and for most of us would be an exceptional men-
tal clarity. I would say of Daphne at the onset of her illness, “She is
not herself today,” in the faith that tomorrow would see the familiar
traits return. Intelligence, energy, curiosity, hope, and their allies, I
supposed, would surely revive in full measure. They did not.
The disease gave Daphne very strange sensations. The myelin
sheath, a protective covering on the nerves, was being attacked in
Daphne’s body by her own immune system. She spoke of inappropri-
ate sensations from familiar stimuli, as, for instance, a warm shower
feeling normal on half her body and cold on the other half. Half her
tongue was numb. Strange tingling and buzzing sensations came from
no observable stimulus at all. With quite good justification but, very
uncharacteristically, Daphne became highly irritable, fearful, and
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3
Where I
depressed. The thought that her body would always undergo such
Am Com-
intensely strange sensations was literally driving her mad.
ing From
Eventually, after the first massive attack was in remission, hope
did return to Daphne, in a muted form. She began to think that she
might have periods of being like her old self. In the past she had
worked with great enthusiasm at every task, from putting down inlay
in a hardwood floor to the most abstract of intellectual investiga-
tions. She was as clever at crafting physical objects as at constructing
theories. Although she suspected that she would never regain her for-
mer impressive ability to craft material things—since she knew that
her eyesight and physical dexterity were permanently impaired—she
nonetheless hoped to return to her philosophical work as an outlet
for her immense creative impulse. A flame still flickered in those eyes
that had burned with a zeal for philosophical understanding. For the
time being, however, all our energies were directed at improving
Daphne’s health. During the period I describe, there was no time for
reflection. The struggle with the disease consumed us.
Daphne had had a keen, incisive mind and a powerful memory.
Her mind was immediately somewhat dulled and her memory, in the
short term, was less certain. I remember her lying down with some
philosophical books gathered around her, making a valiant effort to be
what she had been. Not only did she realize that she could not under-
stand the text she was reading, but her own marginalia explicating the
text had become incomprehensible. This was not the first time since
becoming ill that she had tried unsuccessfully to work. She picked up
something else while I turned to a task that distracted me for a
moment. What she had picked up fell from her hands. I looked up. It
was her own doctoral thesis. She could not understand a word of it.
In this moment, the realization rushed upon her that she would not
recover the abilities in which she had invested so much of her life. She
looked up at me as if from a great depth.
In the past she had worked with blazing intensity. She had needed
to be reminded to eat and sleep when she became engrossed in philo-
sophical work. Now she could neither concentrate nor work at all and,
after many attempts, had come to believe she never would work again.
Are we what we are able to do? Daphne was inconsolable. For a while
she seemed convinced that she had observed her own death.