{"title":"The Personite Problem and the Stage-Theoretic Reply","authors":"H. Noonan","doi":"10.31577/orgf.2022.29206","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Personites are shorter-lived, person-like things that extend across part of a person’s life. Their existence follows from the standard perdurance view of persons. Johnston argues that it has bizarre moral consequences. For example, it renders morally problematic spending time learning a difficult language in anticipation of going abroad. The crucial thought is that if persons have moral status so do personites. Johnston argues for this claim. Kaiserman responds, on behalf of stage theory, that this only works on a perdurantist account. This is a conservative response to the problem. It seeks to show that retaining the ontology of perdurantism one can resolve the difficulty by a semantic change. I show that the personite problem can be reworked as an argument against stage theorists. The stage theorist can respond by rejecting an assumption of the reasoning. But if it is acceptable for him to do so the perdurantist can reject this assumption too, which is enough by itself to block Johnston’s argument. Thus, for all it helps with the personite problem, stage theorists might as well be perdurantists.","PeriodicalId":43025,"journal":{"name":"Organon F","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Organon F","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29206","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Personites are shorter-lived, person-like things that extend across part of a person’s life. Their existence follows from the standard perdurance view of persons. Johnston argues that it has bizarre moral consequences. For example, it renders morally problematic spending time learning a difficult language in anticipation of going abroad. The crucial thought is that if persons have moral status so do personites. Johnston argues for this claim. Kaiserman responds, on behalf of stage theory, that this only works on a perdurantist account. This is a conservative response to the problem. It seeks to show that retaining the ontology of perdurantism one can resolve the difficulty by a semantic change. I show that the personite problem can be reworked as an argument against stage theorists. The stage theorist can respond by rejecting an assumption of the reasoning. But if it is acceptable for him to do so the perdurantist can reject this assumption too, which is enough by itself to block Johnston’s argument. Thus, for all it helps with the personite problem, stage theorists might as well be perdurantists.
期刊介绍:
Organon F publishes high-quality articles on the entire range of topics discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. Accordingly, we invite authors to submit articles that address issues that belong, but are not limited, to philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophical logic. We also consider analytically written articles on ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy and history of philosophy. The principal aim is to publish original articles that meet the standards typical of analytic philosophy, primarily those of conceptual clarity, precision and soundness of argumentation.