shoemaker. the human animal by eric olson

The Human Animal by Eric OlsonReview by: Sydney ShoemakerNoûs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 496-504Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2671998 .

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NOUS 33:3 (1999) 496-504

Eric Olson, The Human Animal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

SYDNEY SHOEMAKER

Cornell University

In this stimulating book Eric Olson vigorously opposes what he calls the "Psychological Approach" to the topic of personal identity. This is the view, descended from Locke's memory theory, which holds that personal identity is in some way constituted by psychological continuity and connectedness. As Olson says, this has been the dominant view in recent discussions of this topic. On most versions of this view it is possible in principle for a person to have different bodies at different times as the result of a transfer, via a brain transplant or some sort of brain scanning procedure, of the person's psychology from one body to another. Olson is certainly not the first to question this view. Bernard Williams and Judith Thompson, among others, have defended bodily continuity accounts of personal identity.' And others, including Michael Ayers and Paul Snowdon, have defended the "animalist" view that the identity of a person is the identity of a living human animal, and constituted by biological rather than psychological continuity.2 Olson's view, which he calls the "Biological Approach," is a highly sophisticated version of the latter view. It is lucidly and brilliantly argued, and the book should be read by anyone interested in the topic.

Following David Wiggins (and Aristotle), Olson holds that in a case of genuine persistence the persisting subject must essentially fall under a "substance concept," one that provides an answer to the question "What is it?" And according to Olson, the substance concept we fall under is not person but living human animal. The conceptperson is a phase concept, not a substance concept. We are not essentially persons, and we all begin our lives as non-persons, namely as fetuses. One of his arguments against the Psychological Ap- proach rests on the fact that during the fetal period of human existence there is no psychology present, and so no psychological connectedness or continuity that could constitute continued identity.

Although Olson holds that our identity consists in the identity of living human animals, he does not insist that this is true of all possible persons. Going along with the Lockean definition of person as "Thinking, intelligent being...," he allows that there could be persons that are not living human animals-gods, angels, demons, Cartesian egos, electronic

? 1999 Blackwell Publishers Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK.

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computers, and so forth. Apparently the persistence conditions for persons will differ depending on what sort of thing they are-what substance concept they instantiate. In our case they are those of living human animals.

Given the Lockean definition of "person" a fetus would not (yet) be a person; so given that definition and Olson's view that we were once fetuses, it follows that person is not a substance concept. But Olson thinks that there are independent reasons for thinking that it could not be a substance concept. Applying a substance concept to something is supposed to answer the question "What is it?"-and he thinks the concept person is unsuited for answering that question. He compares it to the concept locomotor, applicable to anything (from crabs to battleships) capable of moving under its own steam, and maintains, plau- sibly enough, that it would be absurd to count the latter as a substance concept.

Here I found the argument questionable. Invoking the Lockean definition of "person," Olson says that just as a locomotor is defined as something that has the capacity to move, a person is defined as something that has the capacity to think. And he says that saying in this way what something can do is not saying what it is. But it is in the spirit of the Lockean definition to define a person as a subject of certain mental attributes (intelligence, con- sciousness, etc.); and while many of these bestow capacities on their possessors, the same is true of attributes that might be cited in characterizing animals, or organisms. Person and locomotor are functional concepts; but so too, arguably, are animal and organism. Perhaps the claim is that just as any locomotor is, in the sense of being identical with, a thing of some more fundamental kind (crab, battleship, etc.), so any person is, in the sense of being identical with, a thing of some more fundamental kind (animal, god, computer, etc.), I think that if this were so, it would make plausible the claim that person is a phase concept, and that persons get their persistence conditions from the more fundamental entities they are. That is how it is with locomotor. But this conclusion can be avoided by holding that the relation of persons to animals, computers, etc., is constitution rather than identity. More on this later.

Contrary to what one might expect, Olson does not deny that in the case where the entire brain of a person is transplanted into another body, the person goes with the brain. This is because he takes the lower brain, more particularly the brainstem, to be the biological center of the living human animal. If in such a transplant the living animal goes with the brain, then so does the person. What Olson does deny is that if the cerebrum is transplanted without the brainstem the person goes with it. He assumes that a cerebrum transplant could yield a degree of psychological connectedness, between donor and recipient, equivalent to that which exists between temporally proximate stages in the history of a normal human being. (Occasionally he puts this by allowing that the recipient could have the "mind" of the donor-but I do not think he means to take minds seriously as entities, having persistence conditions of their own.) But if the brainstem is left behind, so is the person. In the case he mostly considers, where the cerebrum is not replaced, the person survives as a human vegetable.

Although Derek Parfit is among those associated with the Psychological Approach, there is a sense in which his work, in particular his attack on the view that identity is what matters in survival, set the stage for Olson's. In explaining away the "Transplant Intu- ition," the intuition that in a cerebrum transplant the person goes with the cerebrum, he invokes what he calls the "Parfit-Shoemaker" thesis, the view that what matters is not identity but psychological continuity and connectedness. He does not actually endorse this thesis, but he does appear to endorse some of its consequences: that it is the well being of



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the cerebrum recipient that the cerebrum donor, and his or her friends, should be especially concerned about in advance of the transplant, that it is the cerebrum recipient that should be held responsible for the cerebrum donor's deeds, and that in other ways it would be reasonable for others to treat the recipient as the original person. On the view that identity is not what matters, all of this is compatible with the view that the transplant recipient and transplant donor are not numerically identical. And on the view that it does matter, it can be seen as underlying the intuition that the person does survive the transplant in a new body (with "survive" understood, as Olson always understands it, as implying numerical identity). A related explanation of the transplant intuition is the existence in ordinary speech of a usage of "same person" in which it is not used to make ajudgment of numerical identity, but is used to say something about what the person ought to be prudentially concerned about, held responsible for, and so forth. Olson's "bold conjecture" is that (alluding to a cerebrum transfer version of Locke's Prince-Cobbler example) "The fact that Brainy is the same person after the operation as Prince was before it, in this practical sense of 'same person', is the main source of the Transplant Intuition" (p. 69).

It may seem that this view should please everyone. It allows the devotees of the Psy- chological Approach to retain the words of their account, as long as "same person" is understood in "practical" sense rather than the numerical-identity-implying sense; and it allows them to hold that psychological continuity is "what matters." And it respects the seeming truism that we are animals, and the plausible claim that the persistence of animals consists in a kind of biological continuity (of which Olson gives an insightful and scien- tifically well-informed description). Indeed, I think that anyone who agrees that each of us is an animal, where the "is" is the "is" of identity, will have a hard time resisting Olson's view, and may well feel inclined to accept Olson's explanation of the Transplant Intuition. (Contrariwise, those who are convinced that identity is what matters will find themselves with a reason for rejecting the view that we are identical with animals.)

Olson considers attempts to reconcile the Psychological Approach with the view that we are, in the sense of being identical with, living animals, and raises powerful objections against them. For example, one such attempt involves offering a disjunctive account de- signed to allow that the fetus is the same (the same living animal-not the same person, because not yet a person) as the mature person, while allowing the person to go with the cerebrum in the case where it is transplanted. But this will have the implausible consequence that in the cerebrum transfer case the animal that is left behind as a living vegetable is a different animal from the one that was there before, despite sharing all its organs (except the cerebrum) and despite the continuity of biological functioning. It will be a different animal because, on the disjunctive account, the animal that was there before, being the person, will have gone with the cerebrum. Because such a disjunctive account cannot avoid this consequence, I think that the claim that this consequence is unacceptable turns out to be even more central to Olson's case than the claim that we were once fetuses.

But as Olson is aware, there is a possible reading of the truism that we are animals that does not construe the "are" as the "are" of identity. The truism can be read as saying that each of us is "coincident" with, and in some sense "constituted" by, a living animal. There is a sense in which each of us is something that was once a fetus-but this is an "is" meaning "is constituted by," not the "is" of identity. There is no need to say that the fetus went out of existence when the person came into being; it continued to exist, eventually becoming a mature human animal. But at no point are the person and the human animal one and the same. Olson attempts to show that this view is incoherent, but I do not think he succeeds.




Olson is at some pains to insist that his view that we are living human animals is not the same as the view that we are bodies, or that personal identity consists in bodily identity. Following Peter van Inwagen and others, he appears to find the notion of a human body suspect. But a view he appears to hold gives prima facie support to the view that each of us is coincident with a body with which it is not identical. He appears to hold that, as creatures who are essentially living animals, we cease to exist at death. But after death there is, normally, a corpse. Olson rightly ridicules the suggestion that the fetus goes out of existence when the person comes into existence. But it seems equally ridiculous to say that the corpse is something that comes into existence at death. It seems overwhelmingly natural to say that what after death is a person's corpse is something that existed, as that person's body, prior to death-that scars and tattoos on its surface are traces of things that happened to it earlier. Olson resists saying this. He suggests that the view derives in part from an accident of English usage-that we call corpses "bodies." And he denies that any appeal to spatiotemporal continuity can show that what is a corpse after death existed before death. It will soon be clear why Olson has to take this rather implausible line. Assuming that the human animal ceases to exist at death, and assuming that where the human animal is there is a body that does not cease to exist but becomes a corpse, the human animal and the body are nonidentical. They will therefore be coincident entities, one of them perhaps constituting the other. And then, as we shall see, the objection that Olson raises to the view that persons and human animals are coincident entities will apply equally to Olson's own position.

This objection takes a variety of forms, but the basic idea is that since the human animal coincident with a person would be just like the person except for its history and persistence conditions, it should be like the person mentally or psychologically. "Consider the animal that you now share your matter with, on this proposal-the one that started out as a fetus. That animal would seem to be rational and conscious if you are rational and conscious; at any rate, its brain and nervous system, its sensory stimulations, and its behavior are no different from yours. Yet it is not a person, for the Psychological Approach does not apply to it. But doesn't the animal think (wrongly) that it is a person? And how do you know that you aren't making the same mistake? How do you know that you aren't the animal rather than the person?" (pp. 80-8 1). Although Olson says (p. 126) that the Biological Approach is compatible with property dualism, here he appears to assume that the mental properties of a person are determined by its physical properties. If the human animal is distinct from the person, but shares its physical properties, it should share its mental properties. As Olson observes, on the Lockean definition of "person" this should make it a person. But on the coincidence view it is not. So much the worse, it would seem, for the coincidence view. I shall refer to this as the "too many minds" objection.

It should be apparent that Olson himself is faced with the too many minds objection if he cannot avoid the view, suggested above, that coincident with a human animal there is a bodily entity that is not identical with it because it continues to exist, as a corpse, after the animal has ceased to exist. If physical properties determine mental properties, then there is the same case for saying that this bodily entity shares the mental properties of the animal (which on Olson's view is the person) as there is for saying that, on the coincidence view Olson's argument is directed against, the human animal shares its mental properties with the person. And, of course, if we can find a plausible way of denying that the bodily entity (the corpse-to-be) shares the mental properties of the person, this may provide us with a way of denying that the human animal shares the mental properties of the person.



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I do not pretend to be able to show that Olson must accept the view that coincident with the human animal there is a bodily entity which shares its physical properties but is not identical with it. But the ways of avoiding this that leap to mind are either unattractive or at odds with fundamental features of Olson's position. One is to hold that dying does not involve something's becoming a corpse, but instead involves the replacement of an animal with a numerically distinct entity made up of the same cells, organs, etc.. This, as I have suggested, seems no more plausible than the view that the origin of a human being involves the replacement of a fetus by a numerically distinct entity composed of (mostly) the same organic matter. Another way of avoiding this coincidence view is to abandon the view that the existence of an animal ends with death, and hold that the corpse-to-be is the animal rather than a bodily entity coincident with it. This makes trouble for Olson's account of animal persistence in terms of biological continuity-the view that "If x is an animal at t and y exists at t", x=y if and only if the vital functions that y has at t* are causally continuous with those x has at t" (p. 135). What it would seem to require is the replacement of this account with a disjunctive account, incorporating a biological account of the persistence of an animal during the period in which it is alive, and some different account for the period following its death. Offhand, this seems no more plausible than the disjunctive account of the identity of persons which Olson rejects, that which incorporates a biological criterion for the fetal stage of a human being's existence and a psychological criterion for the period after the human being has become a person.

It seems clear, in any case, that for each person there is, at any moment of time, a physical entity which is coincident with it but not identical with it, and whose physical properties determine (near enough) its mental properties. I have in mind the portion of matter, or collection of fundamental particles, of which the person is at that time composed. This is plainly not identical with the person, since the person is composed of different portions of stuff at different times. This entity does not, I take it, share all of the person's physical characteristics; it would certainly be wrong to speak of it as having a certain build and complexion, and at least odd to speak of it as having a height. But it does have physical properties, and its physical properties determine those of the person. Con- sider the portion of matter, the collection of fundamental particles, that currently consti- tutes me. There could not be a portion of matter having a composition just like that of this one, with particles exactly like those in it organized in just the way the particles in it are organized, without there being a person having just the physical properties it has. And if those physical properties in turn determine the mental properties of the person, then the properties of the quantity of matter determine them. (If for externalist reasons we say that it is only in combination with certain relational and historical properties that the physical properties of a person determine her mental properties, we can say that it is in combination with corresponding relational and historical properties that the physical properties of the portion of matter determine them.) But this of course does not mean that the portion of matter itself has those mental properties; this is certainly not a case of "too many minds." What is determined by the existence of a portion of stuff having thus and such physical properties (and thus and such relational and historical properties) is not that it, that portion of stuff, has certain mental properties; what is determined is that there is, composed of that portion of stuff, a person having those mental properties.

It may seem that this gives us no help with the too many minds objection. For there seems to be a crucial difference between the coincidence we have here and that which a proponent of the Psychological Approach might hold there is between a person and a




human animal, and that which I have suggested Olson should hold there is between a living animal and a human body (corpse-to-be). The physical properties of the portion of matter are different from, although they do determine, the physical properties of the person with which it is coincident. Whereas, on the face of it, the physical properties of the human animal are the same as those of the person, and the physical properties of the corpse-to-be are the same as those of the human animal. Certainly, the physical predicates true of the person, the human animal, and the corpse-to-be are the same. But if the person, the human animal, and the corpse-to-be share the same physical properties, and if in the case of the person the having of these properties determines that it, the possessor of those properties, has certain mental properties, then why isn't it true also in the case of the human animal and the corpse-to-be that having the physical properties determines that the possessor of those properties has certain mental properties? If it does, and if any two of these entities are numerically distinct, we have too many minds.

But it is worth observing, to begin with, that those who take the Psychological Ap- proach, and think that it is possible for a person to have different bodies at different times (owing to a brain or cerebrum transfer), have reason to deny that it is true in general that a physical predicate ascribes the same property when applied to a person as it does when applied to a body (corpse-to-be) or human animal. Consider a predicate like "weighs 200 pounds." The psychological theorist will hold that this is true of a person in virtue of that person's having, contingently, a body that weighs 200 pounds. The property of the person will be a relational property that the person has in virtue being related in a certain way to a body that has a certain nonrelational property; and the predicate used to ascribe the first to the person is the same as that used to ascribe the second to the body (and to the human animal). The relation presumably will involve the person's having volitional control over the body, and the stimulation of its sensory receptors being the immediate causal source of the person's perceptual experiences. Olson calls this, rather contentiously, a "Cartesian view of the meaning of 'my body"' (p. 145). My point here is that Olson cannot assume, without begging the question, that because the same physical predicates are true of the person and the human animal, the same physical properties are possessed by both.

But the physical properties that matter here are those that determine mental properties, and these will intimately involve states of the cerebrum. Given that the person is not the cerebrum, these will not be properties of the cerebrum. They will be properties whose possession by a person is constituted by the person's having a cerebrum in a certain condition. On a physicalist view (and despite his saying that his view is compatible with property dualism, Olson usually seems to assume a physicalist view), these properties will determine mental properties by "realizing" or "implementing" them.

So consider a predicate of the form "has a cerebrum in condition X." This can be true of a person, of a human animal, and of a corpse-to-be. Does it ascribe the same property whichever of these entities it is applied to? That depends on whether "has" has the same sense in all of these applications. And arguably it does not. For a human animal or corpse- to-be to "have" a certain cerebrum is presumably for that cerebrum to be attached inside its skull in a certain way. Assuming, as I think Olson does, that the mental life of a person is largely grounded in the person's cerebrum, for a person to "have" a certain cerebrum is for the person's mental states to be (largely) realized in, or at any rate determined by, states of that cerebrum. Here proponents of the Psychological Approach may differ among themselves as to whether it is essential to a person that he or she have a certain cerebrum. Those who believe that the required sort of causal connectedness must involve the "normal cause"



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will say that it does; those who believe that "any cause" will do (e.g., those who think one could get to Mars by teletransportation) will deny this. But on either view, what it is for a person to have a particular cerebrum will be different from what it is for an animal or corpse-to-be to have one; and for that reason the property ascribed by "has a cerebrum in condition X" when applied to a person will be different from that ascribed when it is applied to a human animal or corpse-to-be.

But there is a deeper reason why the properties ascribed are different. It is true in general of properties that they are individuated by the contribution they can make to causing various effects, or, as I like to put it, by the contribution they do make to the causal powers of the things that have them.3 And to a considerable extent, this is a matter of how their instantiation affects, or is liable to affect, the future career of the thing in which they are instantiated. Exercises of the causal powers of a thing involve the occurrence of events in the subsequent career of that very thing-when combusti- bility is exercised, it is the combustible thing that burns. This means that what properties a thing can have is not independent of the persistence conditions of that thing. The persistence conditions must be such as to allow the instantiation of the property to have its appropriate effects on the thing's subsequent career; they must be such that the thing in which the successor states appropriate to a given state occur counts as the same as the thing in which that state occurred. In the case of mental states, what determines the appropriate successor states of a given state, when combined with certain other states, are its functional role and "cognitive dynamics." As I have suggested elsewhere, the psychological connectedness and continuity which the "psychological approach" holds to be constitutive of personal identity can be seen as the playing out over time of the characteristic functional roles and cognitive dynamics of the various mental states.4

But what goes for mental properties also goes for the physical properties that realize them. One way of characterizing the "realization" relationship is to say that property P realizes property Q just in case the forward-looking causal features of Q are a subset of those of P (where a property's having a forward-looking causal feature is a matter of its being such that its instantiation makes a certain contribution to the causal powers of its possessor).5 If the causal natures of some combination of mental properties give them a successor state consisting in the instantiation of another combination of properties, the physical realizers of the first combination of mental properties must have causal natures that give them a successor state consisting in the instantiation of a combination of physical properties that are realizers of the second combination of mental properties. It goes with this that the possessor of the realizer properties must have the same persistence conditions as the possessor of the mental properties they realize.

Now suppose that a given mental property has as one of its physical realizers the property having a cerebrum in condition X. The predicate that ascribes that property can also be used to ascribe properties to the human animal and to the corpse-to-be. Are these all the same property? Arguably, the answer is No. Assuming that the psychology of a person is based primarily in the cerebrum, the functional role and cognitive dynamics of mental states will be played out in the cerebrum. If a mental state is realized in a particular cerebrum, its appropriate successor states will be realized in that same cerebrum. If the cerebrum is transferred to another body, in a way that does not interfere with its internal operations, it will be the possessor of that body that will have the successor state of the physical realizer of that mental state. But the successor states of the physical states of the human animal will occur in that same human animal, and the successor states of the corpse-




to-be will occur in that same corpse-to-be. So if properties are individuated by their causal roles, the physical property ascribed to persons by the predicate "has a cerebrum in condition X" cannot be the same as that ascribed to human animals and corpses-to-be by that same predicate.

If one is wedded to the idea that the same predicate should always ascribe the same property, one could insist that a combination of physical properties cannot by itself determine an appropriate successor state-one could hold that it does so only in conjunction with a property (call it a "sortal property") the having of which consists in having a certain persistence condition. Then one could say that "has a cerebrum in condition X" ascribes the same property whether it is applied to persons, human animals, or corpses-to-be. But then one could no longer claim that the property ascribed with this predicate is by itself a realizer of a given mental property; the realizer would instead be the conjunction of this property and the sortal property of having the persistence condition of persons. And we have good reasons for holding that this conjunctive property does not belong to human animals and corpses-to-be-any more than it belongs to the portion of stuff that coincides with a person at a given time.

I am making two distinct claims here. One is that someone who holds that persons are nonidentical with, but coincident with, human animals and bodies has the resources for answering the too many minds objection; such a one can hold that what realizes mental properties in persons is not present in human animals, as such, or in bodies (corpses-to-be), as such, either because these do not have the same physical properties as persons (despite having the same physical predicates true of them), or because what realizes a mental state is not a physical property simpliciter but rather the conjunction of a physical property and a "sortal property" embodying a persistence condition. The second claim is that, assuming that a cerebrum transplant is possible and that the cerebrum is the carrier of psychological connectedness and continuity, the claim that human animals and mere bodies (corpses-to- be) do not have the physical realizers of mental properties is independently motivated by considerations having to do with the constitutive causal roles and cognitive dynamics of mental properties.6

If it is still thought counterintuitive to deny that persons are strictly identical with the human animals they "are" (so that the "are" has to express some sort of constitution rather than identity), it should be noted that Olson's view has counterintuitive consequences of its own. As noted earlier, Olson holds that a defender of the Biological Approach could hold that in a transplant of the whole brain the person goes with the brain-this because the whole brain includes the brainstem, which is the control center for the human animal. This suggests that if just the brainstem is transferred from one body to another, the person goes with the brainstem-even though the recipient has full psychological continuity and connectedness, not with the brainstem donor, but with the past person whose body (except for the brainstem) it currently has. Olson may not be committed to this; while he definitely holds that if the head of a person is grafted onto the torso of another, the person goes with the head, he does not explicitly commit himself to the view that a whole brain transfer could be person-preserving. But he does explicitly hold (see p. 141) that if a brainstem is replaced, and the result is a creature psychologically and bodily (except for the brainstem) continuous with the former owner of the brainstem, that person does not survive. To call these consequences counterintuitive seems to me an understatement.

Earlier I mentioned Olson's use of the "Parfit-Shoemaker Thesis" to explain, or explain away, the Transplant Intuition. Let me observe that my version of the Parfit-Shoemaker



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Thesis is somewhat different from Parfit's. I agree that there are possible cases, such as the much discussed double half-brain transplant, in which personal identity and "what matters" come apart. And I agree that these show that what matters is constituted by relations of psychological continuity and connectedness that do not necessarily guarantee identity. But I also think, as indicated above, that psychological connectedness is the playing out over time of the causal natures of mental states, and that there is something conceptually problematic about cases in which this playing out of the causal nature of a state involves the generating of successor states in a person other than the one who had that state. There is no way of describing such a case that does not put considerable strain on our concepts.7 And I would insist that the identity conditions of persons should be such that where the psychological continuity and connectedness are such as to yield "what matters," they should yield identity, except where this is precluded on logical grounds (e.g., in the fission case, by the transitivity of identity). Supposing that I am about to undergo a cerebrum transplant, and know that it will yield full psychological continuity between me as I am now and the recipient as he will be after the operation, the following conditional seems to me obviously true: if my relation to the recipient is such as to give me what matters for survival, then that person will be me. I think that the antecedent of this is clearly true. And so, apparently, does Olson. We differ over whether there are good reasons in this case to block the natural inference from having what matters in survival to having survival. I have argued that there are not.8

Notes

'See Williams, "The Self and the Future," The Philosophical Review, Vol. 79, April 1970, and Thomson, "People and Their Bodies," in J. Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

2See Ayers, Locke, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1990), and Snowdon, "Persons, animals, and ourselves," in The person and the human mind: Issues in ancient and modern philosophy," ed. Chris- topher Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and "Personal identity and brain transplants," in Humnan beings, ed. D. Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1991).

3See my "Causality and Properties" and "Identity, Properties and Causality," in my Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984), and my "Causal and Metaphysical Necessity," in Pacific Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 79, March 1998.

4See my "Personal Identity: A Materialist's View" in S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); also my "Self and Substance," in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philo- sophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation and World, 1997.

5See my "Realization and Mental Causation," a short version of which is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy.

6This argument is presented in somewhat more detail in my "Self, Body, and Coincidence," forthcoming in The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume for 1999.

7See David Velleman, "Self to Self," The Philosophical Review, 105, 1996, pp. 418-436. 81 am grateful to Eric Olson for helpful comments on an earlier draft.



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