Persons and Bodies

In my earlier books, I developed a critique of the dominant view of the mind, according to which attitudes like beliefs are in the first instance brain states, and I offered an alternative, more pragmatic, approach. See Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) and Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On my alternative, attitudes — like believing, desiring, and intending — should be understood not primarily as brain states but as states of whole persons. Such a view raises the questions What is a person? and What is the relation between a person and her body? These are the questions that I hope to answer in this book. The answers require a very rich and detailed theory that I call the ‘Constitution View’ In this book, I set out the Constitution View and defend it against criticism and rival views.

I have tried out much of the theory and argument that appears here at departmental colloquia and at conferences where I have given papers recently: Yale University, Notre Dame University, York University (Ontario), Texas Tech, Texas A&M, University of Oklahoma, University of California (Santa Barbara), Whittier College, Utrecht University (Holland), Conference on Lynne Baker's Theory of the Attitudes (Tilburg University, Nijmegen University, Dutch Research School in Philosophy [the Netherlands]), American Philosophical Association (Central Division), the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, the Conference on Naturalism (Humboldt University [Berlin]), and the Conference on Epistemology and Naturalism (University of Stirling [Scotland]).