Persons and Properties: A Sartrean Perspective on Love's Object

It is often said that to love someone we must love her for her own sake. But what does this mean? Various answers have been offered up by philosophers. Alan Soble's ‘aggregate’ view of identity focuses on properties of the beloved as key to understanding love's basis and, in a less direct way, its object. This view does not give us a clear distinction between persons and properties. David Velleman's view makes this distinction more clearly but creates a gap between properties and personhood. Jean‐Paul Sartre's view which emphasizes embodiment, addresses the main deficiencies of both of these former views.     

Persons and organisms

The philosophical quest for unity leads to the desire for a clear and adequate conception of human reality as a “mind-body unity.” This quest for unity has led both to conceptions of considerable heuristic value and to overly reductionistic approaches that impoverish our full relation to reality. Three basic themes are developed in this essay:

1. That on an ontological level dualistic and monistic approaches to mind-body remain equally plausible.
2. That on a practical level, epistemological considerations require us to retain a dualistic approach suggested by the terms “person” and “organism.”
3. That psychotherapy (whether religious or secular) must ground itself in the notion of “person.”

Differences between the concepts of “person” and “organism” are delineated on six specific points. Finally, it is suggested that a holistic approach to health requires both constructs.     

History and Persons

The non‐identity problem is usually considered in the forward‐looking direction but a version of it also applies to the past, due to the fact that even minor historical changes would have affected the whole subsequent sequence of births, dramatically changing who comes to exist next. This simple point is routinely overlooked by familiar attitudes and evaluative judgments about the past, even those of sophisticated historians. I shall argue, however, that it means that when we feel sadness about some historical tragedy, or think of one possible course of history as better than another, these judgments and attitudes can be understood in terms of two opposing perspectives on the past: an impersonal standpoint concerned only with how much value each course of history contains, and a person‐centred standpoint concerned with harms and benefits to the people who had actually existed. In this paper, I will set out these radically different visions of what matters in history and point out some of their surprising implications.     

Persons and Affordances

Abstract

Interdisciplinary interest in affordances is increasing. This paper is a philosophical contribution. The question is: Do persons offer affordances? Analysis of the concepts ‘person’ and ‘affordance’ supports an affirmative answer. On a widely accepted understanding of what persons are, persons exhibit many of the features typical of socionormative affordances. However, to understand persons as offering affordances requires, on the face of it, stretching traditional understandings of the concept of affordance: persons, in contrast to the organisms that partially constitute persons, do not seem to be available to perception. This and similar worries are responded to.     

Persons and Substances

I have argued elsewhere that the psychological criterion of personalidentity entails that a person is not an object, but a series ofpsychological events. As this is somewhat counter-intuitive,I consider whether the psychological theorist can argue that a person, while not a substance, exists in a way that is akin to theway that substances exist. I develop ten criteria that such a`quasi-substance' should meet, and I argue that a reasonablecase can be made to show that the psychological theorist's conception of a person meets these criteria.     

Indiscernible Persons

In this article I discuss identity and indiscernibility for person-stages and persons. Identity through time is not an identity relation (it is a unity relation). Identity is carefully distinguished from persistence. Identity is timeless and necessary. Person-stages are carefully distinguished from persons. Theories of personal persistence are not theories of identity for persons. I deal not with the persistence of persons through time but with the timeless and necessary identity and indiscernibility of persons. I argue that it is possible that there are non-identical but indiscernible temporally whole persons. I discuss the biographies of persons and develop the type or token distinction for persons. Twins in symmetrical or eternally recurrent universes are examples of indiscernible persons. I discuss temporal and modal branching, and I end with survival for person-tokens and eternity for person-types.     

Demandingness and Boundaries Between Persons

ABSTRACT

Demandingness objections to consequentialism often claim that consequentialism underestimates the moral significance of the stranger/special other distinction, mistakenly extending to strangers demands it is proper for special others to make on us, and concluding that strangers may properly demand anything of us if it increases aggregate goodness. This argument relies on false assumptions about our relations with special others. Boundaries between ourselves and special others are both a common and a good-making feature of our relations with them. Hence, demandingness objections that rely on the argument in question fail. But the same observations about our relations with special others show that there are many demands special others may not properly make, and since we cannot be more guilty of unjustified partiality in insisting on boundaries between ourselves and strangers than on boundaries between ourselves and special others, there are – as demandingness objections maintain – some demands strangers may not properly make on us.