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    Persons As Biological Processes. A Bio-P

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    GNCDW
    This document discusses how the philosophical debate around personal identity is stuck in a dilemma between reductionist theories that explain it away and non-reductionist theories that fail to provide an informative account. The author argues that adopting a process ontological framework, where processes and change are primary rather than static things, can resolve this dilemma. Under this view, human persons are conceived of as biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

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    Persons As Biological Processes. A Bio-P

    Uploaded by

    GNCDW
    15 views1 page
    This document discusses how the philosophical debate around personal identity is stuck in a dilemma between reductionist theories that explain it away and non-reductionist theories that fail to provide an informative account. The author argues that adopting a process ontological framework, where processes and change are primary rather than static things, can resolve this dilemma. Under this view, human persons are conceived of as biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

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    This document discusses how the philosophical debate around personal identity is stuck in a dilemma between reductionist theories that explain it away and non-reductionist theories that fail to provide an informative account. The author argues that adopting a process ontological framework, where processes and change are primary rather than static things, can resolve this dilemma. Under this view, human persons are conceived of as biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    15 views1 page

    Persons As Biological Processes. A Bio-P

    Uploaded by

    GNCDW
    This document discusses how the philosophical debate around personal identity is stuck in a dilemma between reductionist theories that explain it away and non-reductionist theories that fail to provide an informative account. The author argues that adopting a process ontological framework, where processes and change are primary rather than static things, can resolve this dilemma. Under this view, human persons are conceived of as biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Persons as Biological Processes:

    A Bio-Processual Way Out of the Personal Identity Dilemma

    Anne Sophie Meincke

    Forthcoming in: Nicholson, D./Dupré, J. (eds.), Everything Flows:


    Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press

    Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However,
    so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically
    comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma:
    reductionist theories explain personal identity away while non-reductionist theories fail to give
    any informative account at all. In this chapter I argue that this dilemma emerges from an
    underlying commitment, shared by both sides of the debate, to an ontology which gives the
    priority to static unchanging things. I defend the claim that the dilemma of personal identity
    can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a
    process ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary.
    Human persons are biological higher-order processes, rather than things, and their identity
    conditions can be scientifically investigated.

    Keywords: personal identity; reductionism; non-reductionism; persistence; change;


    endurance; perdurance; process ontology; substance ontology; biological identity

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