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Persons and Bodies

Persons and Bodies

Persons and Bodies

A Constitution View
Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
March 2000
Available
Paperback
9780521597197
£37.99
GBP
Paperback
GBP
Hardback

    What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can be fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. The Constitution View yields answers to the questions 'What am I most fundamentally?', 'What is a person?', and 'What is the relation between human persons and their bodies'? Baker argues that the complex mental property of first-person perspective enables one to conceive of one's body and mental states as one's own.

    • This is Baker's third book in the philosophy of mind - her two others were well received. Explaining Attitudes (1995) is her previous book in the series
    • Develops a new theory of human persons in the philosophy of mind
    • Gives an answer to questions such as 'What is a person?' and 'What is the relation between a person and his or her body?'

    Product details

    March 2000
    Paperback
    9780521597197
    248 pages
    227 × 152 × 18 mm
    0.37kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • Part I. The Metaphysical Background:
    • 1. Persons in the material world
    • 2. The very idea of constitution
    • 3. The first-person perspective
    • Part II. The Constitution View Explained:
    • 4. The constitution view of human persons
    • 5. Personal identity over time
    • 6. The importance of being a person
    • Part III. The Constitution View Defended:
    • 7. The coherence of the idea of material constitution
    • 8. The coherence of the constitution view
    • 9. In favor of the constitution view.
      Author
    • Lynne Rudder Baker , University of Massachusetts, Amherst

      Lynne Rudder Baker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Explaining Attitudes (Cambridge, 1995), Persons and Bodies (Cambridge, 2000), The Metaphysics of Everyday Life (Cambridge, 2007), and Saving Belief (1987).