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. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role played by derogatory terms (e.g., ‘inyenzi’ or cockroach, ‘inzoka’ or snake) in laying the social groundwork for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide was preceded by an increase in the use of anti-Tutsi derogatory terms among the Hutu. As these linguistic practices evolved, the terms became more openly and directly aimed at Tutsi. Then, during the 100 days of the genocide, derogatory terms and coded euphemisms were used to direct killers (...) to their victims. Understanding these speech acts helps to illuminate the important ways that power is enacted through discourse, how speech acts can prepare the way for physical and material acts, and how speech generates permissions for actions hitherto uncountenanced. Studying the role of speech acts and linguistic practices in laying the groundwork of the genocide illuminates how patterns of speech acts become linguistic practices that constitute permissibility conditions for non-linguistic behaviors. Further, the analysis presented here helps to make sense of the view that a steady, deep, and widespread derogation of a group can be part and parcel of genocide, not only an antecedent to it. (shrink)

Explaining Attitudes offers an important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Lynne Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach - practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is (...) a 'non-starter'. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

My aim is twofold: first, to root out the metaphysical assumptions that generate the problem of mental causation and to show that they preclude its solution; second, to dissolve the problem of mental causation by motivating rejection of one of the metaphysical assumptions that give rise to it. There are three features of this metaphysical background picture that are important for our purposes. The first concerns the nature of reality: all reality depends on physical reality, where physical reality consists of (...) a network of events.1 The second concerns the nature of causation, and the third concerns the conception of behavior. I try to vindicate a robust idea of mental causation. (shrink)

Arguments about temporal becoming often get nowhere. One reason for the impasse lies in the fact that the issue has been formulated as a choice between science on the one hand and common sense (or ordinary language) on the other as the primary source of ontological commitment.' Often' proponents of attributing temporal becoming to the physical universe look to everyday temporal concepts, find them infested with notions involving temporal becoming and conclude that becoming is a basic feature of the physical (...) world. Their opponents may look to physical science, find no reference to temporal becoming and conclude that becoming is not part of the extramental universe.2 Thus construed, the issue of temporal becoming is not directly amenable to argument. This stalemate will be broken, however, if I accomplish my aim: to (re)formulate the question of temporal becoming so that it is subject to adjudication; to show how objections to the thesis of the mind-dependence of becoming can fruitfully be seen (and in a sense unified) as attacks on a single argument for the thesis, an argument from physics; and to defend the con'elusion of the argument from physics from heretofore unanswered objections. The question of the status of temporal becoming is the question of the status of past, present and future.' Events which are at one time in the future, are said to become present and subsequently to recede into the past. Since past and future can be defined as 'earlier than now' and 'later than.. (shrink)

Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic, and homophobic epithets) are bully words with ontological force: they serve to establish and maintain a corrupt social system fuelled by distinctions designed to justify relations of dominance and subordination. No wonder they have occasioned public outcry and legal response. The inferential role analysis developed here helps move us away from thinking of the harms as being located in connotation (representing mere speaker bias) or denotation (holding that the terms fail to refer due to inaccurate (...) descriptive content). The issue is not bad attitudes or referential misfires. An inferential role semantic analysis of derogatory terms shows exactly what is at stake between those who argue that the terms should be eliminated (Absolutists) and those who claim they can be successfully rehabilitated (Reclaimers). The Reclaimer maintains, and the Absolutist denies, that certain contexts can detach the derogatory force from deeply derogatory terms. The article looks at these claims with respect to ‘nigger’ and ‘dyke,’ setting out the inferential role of each term and examining detachability potential. Explaining detachability in terms of linguistic commitments, this article also addresses the issue of whether such terms count as political discourse, and examines the implications of that issue. (shrink)

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

The first-person perspective is a challenge to naturalism. Naturalistic theories are relentlessly third-personal. The first-person perspective is, well, first-personal; it is the perspective from which one thinks of oneself as oneself* without the aid of any third-person name, description, demonstrative or other referential device. The exercise of the capacity to think of oneself in this first-personal way is the necessary condition of all our self-knowledge, indeed of all our self-consciousness. As important as the first-person perspective is, many philosophers have not (...) appreciated the force of the data from the first-person perspective, and suppose that the first-person perspective presents no particular problems for the naturalizing philosopher. For example, Ned Block commented, “It is of course [phenomenal] consciousness rather than...self-consciousness that has seemed such a scientific mystery.” And David Chalmers says that self-consciousness is one of those psychological states that “pose no deep metaphysical enigmas.”. (shrink)

Apology is a necessary component of moral repair of damage done by wrongs against the person. Analyzing the role of apology in the aftermath of atrocity, with a focus on the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, 1994, this article emphasizes the role of recognition failures in grave moral wrongs, the importance of speech acts that offer recognition, and building mutuality through recognition as a route to reconciliation. Understanding the US role in the international failure to stop the ’94 genocide (...) raises the question of how any response could mitigate a world-shattering wrong like genocide. With a focus on survivors, this article explains the concepts of recognition harm and spirit murder to illuminate what survivors experience and need. The third section develops a theory of apology as offering recognition to the victim of wrongdoing —through both the act of speaking-to and through its content. The article examines US President Bill Clinton’s 1998 apology to Rwandans, to understand it as an apology, and to see how it began reconciliation between Americans and Rwandans. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the inter-related significance of apology and material reparations. (shrink)

Spellman argues that Aristotle developed his views about substance in response to Plato’s theory of forms. In particular, she argues that Aristotelian substances are as much like Platonic forms as possible, minus the latter’s separation. Whether ASs are like PFs depends, of course, not only on what one takes ASs to be like, but also on what one takes PFs to be like; accordingly, Spellman provides accounts of both. She argues that ASs are what she calls specimens of natural kinds. (...) A specimen of a natural kind is not Socrates, but Socrates-qua-human-being: Socrates insofar as he is a human being. She argues that Socrates, and Socrates-qua-human-being are numerically the same, but not identical. They are not identical, because not everything true of Socrates is true of Socrates-qua-human-being. Socrates, for example, is snub-nosed, but Socrates-qua-human-being is not; for the latter has all and only the properties contained in the definition of human being. (shrink)

Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self-consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self-consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For (...) example, recently Ned Block commented. (shrink)

Throughout his illustrious career, Roderick Chisholm was concerned with the nature of persons. On his view, persons are what he called ‘entia per se.’ They exist per se, in their own right. I too have developed an account of persons—I call it the ‘Constitution View’—an account that is different in important ways from Chisholm’s. Here, however, I want to focus on a thesis that Chisholm and I agree on: that persons have ontological significance in virtue of being persons. Although I’ll (...) make the notion of ontological significance more precise later, the rough idea is that Fs (persons, or whatever) have ontological significance just in case a new F is a new thing and not just a change in some already-existing thing. (shrink)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book Never Let Me Go is a thoughtful and provocative exploration of what it means to be human. Drawing on insights from the hermeneutic-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, I argue that the movement of Ishiguro’s story can be understood in terms of actualising the human potential for autonomous action. Liberal theories take autonomy to be concerned with analytically and ethically isolatable social units directing their lives in accordance with self-interested preferences, arrived at by means of rational calculation. However, I (...) argue that such theories are simplistic abstractions from our human-life world, distorting the fundamental embodied, embedded, and relational nature of autonomy. When we attend closely to our concrete, lived existence we see instead that autonomy is about responding appropriately to others with whom we share a world. As we follow the path of Ishiguro’s central character Kathy H., we are shown how an awareness and acceptance of our existential finitude as precarious and fallible creatures is necessary for guiding such appropriate interactions. As Kathy grows and is affirmed into her life-world, which grounds and supports her Being, she moves from heteronomy to autonomy; from being moved by external laws to embodying those laws, thereby becoming autonomous. This is exemplified by her appropriation of the carer role, through which she responds in a fitting way to those with whom she shares her world, bearing the weight of and dwelling responsibly within our human condition. (shrink)

The expression ‘nonreductive materialism’ refers to a variety of positions whose roots lie in attempts to solve the mind-body problem. Proponents of nonreductive materialism hold that the mental is ontologically part of the material world; yet, mental properties are causally efficacious without being reducible to physical properties.s After setting out a minimal schema for nonreductive materialism (NRM) as an ontological position, I’ll canvass some classical arguments in favor of (NRM).1 Then, I’ll discuss the major challenge facing any construal of (NRM): (...) the problem of mental causation, pressed by Jaegwon Kim. Finally, I’ll offer a new solution to the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

This paper is based on a literature review of articles discussing the teaching and learning of philosophy in primary and secondary schools. The purpose of this review was to address two research questions: What 'is 'philosophy? What does philosophy do? This paper addresses the first research question—What 'is' philosophy?—by gathering together the various understandings of the word ‘philosophy’ circulating in the literature. There are ten understandings of what philosophy 'is' that have arisen from the literature: philosophy as a foundational concept; (...) philosophy as thinking—a skill, a disposition, a practice; philosophy as method or process; philosophy as a tool or instrument; philosophy as a creative task; philosophy as inquiry; philosophy as search for truth; philosophy as non-dogmatic teaching and hence the emancipation of thought; philosophy as communal activity; philosophy as a way of life. These ten understandings have been consistent over time, from writing in the field in the 1970s through to the present day. Many commentators hold and work with multiple understandings of what philosophy 'is' in their writing. (shrink)

Beginning with Aristotle, philosophers have taken artifacts to be ontologically deficient. This paper proposes a theory of artifacts, according to which artifacts are ontologically on a par with other material objects. I formulate a nonreductive theory that regards artifacts as constituted by - but not identical to - aggregates of particles. After setting out the theory, I rebut a number of arguments that disparage the ontological status of artifacts.

Plato's Parmenides: A Principle of Interpretation and Seven Arguments SANDRA PETERSON PART I. A PRINCIPLE OF INTERPRETATION 1. THE EVIDENT STRUCTURE OF THE PARMENIDES PLATO'S Parmenides falls naturally into halves. In the first half, which is a conversation between Socrates and Parmenides initiated by the young Socra- tes' reaction to arguments of Zcno's, Socrates shows confusion as he tries to answer Parmenides' questions about forms. The second half consists of about 195 short, initially strange-looking, arguments given by Parmenides to a (...) youngster, Aris- totle, as respondent. In between the two halves, at 135d2- 3, Parmenides admires Socrates' "fine" and "divine" passion for arguments. But Parmenides has noticed, even in a conversation of Socrates with Aristotle previous to the setting of the Parmenides, that Socrates is trying to define too soon. Parmenides then recommends to Socrates some exercise. The second half of the Parmenides illustrates it. What is the manner of exercise, Parmenides? he asked. The one you heard from Zeno, he replied. Except for this: I admired you also when you said to him that you would not allow inquiry to wander among the things we see, nor even in their domain, but rather in the field of those things which one would most especially grasp by reasoning and would.. (shrink)

The human tumour suppressor protein p53 is critical for regulation of the cell cycle on genotoxic insult. When DNA is damaged by radiation, chemicals or viral infection, cells respond rapidly by arresting the cell cycle. A G1 arrest requires the activity of wild‐type p53, as it is not observed in cells lacking functionally wild‐type protein, and at least some component of S phase and G2/M arrests is also thought to be p53‐dependent. p53 functions as a transcription factor which binds specific (...) DNA sequences, and recently major downstream targets have been identified, including p21Cip1 an inhibitor of the cell cycle kinases that also blocks the replicative but not the repair function of DNA polymerase δ auxiliary factor, PCNA. Current interest focuses on developing novel cancer therapies based on our knowledge of the activity of p53 and p21Cip1 in the cell cycle. (shrink)

. The extended‐mind thesis is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. Some versions take “extended selves” be to relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. First, I show how EM can be seen as an extension of traditional views of mind. Then, after voicing a couple of qualms about EM, I reject EM in favor of a more modest hypothesis that recognizes enduring subjects of (...) experience and agents with integrated bodies. Nonetheless, my modest hypothesis allows subpersonal states to have nonbiological parts that play essential roles in cognitive processing. I present empirical warrant for this modest hypothesis and show how it leaves room for science and religion to coexist. (shrink)

This article shows how attention to extended metaphors provides the basis for a substantive account of what it is to understand a metaphor. Offering an analysis of extended metaphors modeled on an analysis of co-referential anaphoric chains, this article presents an account of how contexts makes metaphors. The analysis introduces the concept of expressive commitment, commitment to the viability and value of particular modes of discourse. Unlike literal interpretation, metaphorical interpretation puts the expressive commitment in the forefront of the interpretive (...) process. The analogy between extended metaphors and anaphora provides a structure for describing what it is to interpret expressions metaphorically. It generates an account that explains the affinities and differences between extension and explication, and hence of the age-old problem of paraphrase. Further, the account allows for the open-endedness of metaphor without succumbing to the view that metaphor is non-cognitive. Finally, the account developed here underscores the role of expressive commitment in metaphorical interpretation. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that human persons belong, ontologically, in social ontology. After setting out my views on ontology, I turn to persons and argue that they have first-person perspectives in two stages (rudimentary and robust) essentially. Then I argue that the robust stage of the first-person persective is social, in that it requires a language, and languages require linguistic communities. Then I extend the argument to cover the rudimentary stage of the first-person perspective as well. (...) I conclude by enumerating ways in which human persons differ from nonhuman animals. (shrink)

In this article I consider the impact of euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide on the way we live and the relationships we have. I argue that embracing the practice of assisted dying is a deficient form of care that will erode the respectful and responsible human bonds that hold us all well in community.

Infants are unable to make their own decisions or express their own wishes about medical procedures and treatments. They rely on surrogates to make decisions for them. Who should be the decision-maker when an infant’s biological parents are also minors? In this paper, we analyse a case in which the biological mother is a child. The central questions raised by the case are whether minor parents should make medical decisions on behalf of an infant, and if so, what are the (...) limits to this decision-making authority? In particular, can they refuse treatment that might be considered best for the infant? We examine different ethical arguments to underpin parental decision-making authority; we argue that provided that minor parents are capable of fulfilling their parental duties, they should have a right to make medical decisions for their infant. We then examine the ethical limits to minor parents’ decision-making authority for their children. We argue that the restricted authority that teenagers are granted to make medical decisions for themselves looks very similar to the restricted autonomy of all parents. That is, they are permitted to make choices, but not harmful choices. Like all parents, minor parents must not abuse or neglect their children and must also promote their welfare. They have a moral right to make medical decisions for their infants within the same ‘zone of parental discretion’ that applies to adult parents. We conclude that adult and minor parents should have comparable decision-making authority for their infants. (shrink)

According to the Constitution View of persons, a human person is wholly constituted by (but not identical to) a human organism. This view does justice both to our similarities to other animals and to our uniqueness. As a proponent of the Constitution View, I defend the thesis that the coming-into-existence of a human person is not simply a matter of the coming-into-existence of an organism, even if that organism ultimately comes to constitute a person. Marshalling some support from developmental psychology, (...) I give a broadly materialistic account of the coming-into-existence of a human person. I argue for the metaphysical superiority of the Constitution View to Biological Animalism, Thomistic Animalism, and other forms of Substance Dualism. I conclude by discussing the single implication of the Constitution View for thinking about abortion. Footnotesa Thanks to Gareth Matthews and Catherine E. Rudder for comments. I am also grateful to other contributors to this volume, especially Robert A. Wilson, Marya Schechtman, David Oderberg, Stephen Braude, and John Finnis. (shrink)

I am grateful to Dean Zimmerman, Michael Rea, and Derk Pereboom for their close criticism and helpful suggestions for Persons and Bodies. My ideas—especially about the definition of ‘constitution’—have been significantly improved by their comments.

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for (...) dimensional adjective pairs and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity. (shrink)

A cross-linguistic/cultural study of verbal metaphor compares responses to terrorism in the UK (N = 96) and to urban violence in Brazil (N = 11). Focus groups discussed how violence changes perceptions of risk, decisions of daily life, and attitudes to others. Metaphor vehicles were identified in transcribed data, then grouped together semantically; 15 vehicle groupings were used with similar frequencies, 16 groupings more in UK data, 14 more in Brazil data. Systematic and framing metaphors were found inside vehicle groupings. (...) A small set of frequent verbal metaphors work as predicted by conceptual metaphor theory. Other verbal metaphor vehicles work much more specifically, as posited by discourse dynamics theory, metaphorizing contextually distinct aspects of living with violence. Major differences were found in responses to violence: UK participants demonstrate feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency through metaphor vehicles relating to Games of Chance, the Concealed nature of terrorist activity, and Body Postures negatively evaluating response from the authorities; Brazilian participants use metaphor vehicles of Violence to emphasize how the threat of urban violence itself becomes a powerful social force that constrains daily activities. (shrink)

Many physicalists are committed to an austere dichotomy: either beliefs, desires and intentions are scientifically respectable or attributions of such attitudes are all false. One physicalist, Daniel Dennett, offers a third alternative, which seems to permit a kind of instrumentalism concerning attitudes. I argue that Dennett's attempt to reconcile an instrumentalistic account of attributions of attitudes with a thoroughgoing physicalism founders on unresolvable conflicts between his official theory and his actual treatment of key concepts. As a result, instrumentalism concerning attitudes (...) is exposed as inadequate to be a genuine alternative to the physicalist's dichotomy. (shrink)

SummaryQuine uses the notion of ‘quality space’ in Word and Object and in ‘Natural Kinds' as a means of characterizing similarity recognition, which in turn is seen as basic to induction and to language acquisition. In this paper it is argued that ‘quality space’ is too simplistic a notion to bear the explanatory weight given to ‘similarity’. Similarity is explanatorily plausible only because it contains much covert complexity and is essentially mentalistic. The attempt to expunge this mentalism by the behavioural (...) mapping of quality spaces simply loses the explanatory force of similarity.RésuméQuine utilise dans ≤Word and Object≥ et dans ≤Natural Kinds≥ la notion ?on; ≤espace des qualityés≥ comme une façon de caractériser la reconnaissance de la similitude, qui est à son tour considérée comme fondamentale pour ľinduction ct pour ľacquisition du langage. auteur montre que la notion ?on; ≤cspace des qualityés≥ est trop simpliste pour fournir une base suffisante à la valeur explicative attendue de la ≤similitude≥. La similitude ňest plausible comme explication que parce qu'elle cache une grande complexité et čest une notion essentiellement mentale. La tentative de remplacer ce mentalisme par une projection behavioriste sur ľespace des qualites fait perdre à la similitude sa valeur explicative.ZusammenfassungIn ≤Word and Object≥ und in ≤Natural Kinds≥ benutzt Quine den Begriff ≤Eigenschafts‐raum≥ als Mittel um die Wahrnehmung der Ähnlichkeit zu charakterisieren, welche ihrerseits als grundlegend für Induktion und Aneignung der Sprache betrachtet wird. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird argumentiert, dass dieser ≤Eigenschaftsraum≥ zu arm ist, um den Erklärungsgehalt des Begriffs ≤Ähnlichkeit≥ zu tragen. Die Erklärung durch Ähnlichkeit ist nur deshalb plausibel, weil sie versteckte Komplexität enthält und wesentlich mentalistisch ist. Bei dem Versuch, diesem Men‐talismus mithilfe der behavioristischen Abbildung der Eigenschäftsraume auszuweichen, geht die Erklärungskraft des Begriffs der Ähnlichkeit einfach verloren. (shrink)

Theories of the human person differ greatly in their ability to underwrite a metaphysics of resurrection. This paper compares and contrasts a number of such views in light of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. In a Christian framework, resurrection requires that the same person who exists on earth also exists in an afterlife, that a postmortem person be embodied, and that the existence of a postmortem person is brought about by a miracle. According to my view of persons (the Constitution (...) View), a human person is constituted by—but not identical to—a human organism. A person has a first-person perspective essentially, and an organism has interrelated biological functions essentially. I shall argue for the superiority the Constitution View as a metaphysical basis for resurrection. (shrink)