PARTS OF PERSONS

My doctoral research aims at providing a better understanding of the metaphysical structure of personal identity and persistence. I will deal with the following questions: How do we persist over time? What (if anything) makes us identical from one time to another? Personal persistence is an essential issue for many fundamental normative questions, concerning for instance what makes a person morally responsible for a past action or when somebody is justified in having a special prudential concern for one specific future person. The first and main contribution of my research is purely theoretical and concerns the analysis of a specific account of personal identity, namely the perdurantist (or four-dimensionalist) approach, which occupies a marginal position in the contemporary debate. According to a perdurantist account of personal persistence over time, persons are objects that extend through time in a way which is similar to the way they extend through space, that is to say in virtue of having different parts at different space-time regions. This account is both in contrast with what people usually take as the standard endurantist approach – according to which material entities are three-dimensional objects that exist entirely at several times – and the revisionary stage view – which conceives material entities are nothing but instantaneous things, coming into existence and then disappearing right after. My aim is to analyze some new ways for perdurantism, offering on one hand a defense of perdurantism against a nihilist drift (i.e. the collapse of perdurantism into stage theory) and on the other hand an alternative to conventionalist accounts of personal persistence, based on the commitment to a principle of unrestricted diachronic composition. In chapter 2. I deal with some issues coming from recent discussions of grounding and metaphysical explanation, and I apply them to the part-whole relations, putting together issues on grounding and mereological issues. I shall defend the view that perdurants are more fundamental than the temporal parts constituting them. I will call top-down perdurantism the view according to which perdurant wholes are more fundamental than their temporal parts, opposed to what I will call bottom-up perdurantism (which claims that temporal parts are more fundamental than perdurant wholes) and flat-perdurantism (according to which there are no priority relations among temporal parts and perdurant wholes). To achieve my aim, I analyze the reasons one might have to reject the priority of the wholes over their temporal parts, and I argue they do not offer any definite arguments against the priority of perdurant wholes. I conclude that top-down perdurantism is not just plausible, deserving hence more attention, but in fact has significant advantages over other mainstream perdurantist accounts of persistence, such as the fact that it blocks the passage from a perdurantist approach to a stage theoretic view. In chapter 3. I advance and defend some new kinds of moderate perdurantism, namely perdurantist views which are not committed to any form of unrestricted diachronic composition of temporal parts. I focus on four kinds of moderate perdurantism, that I call “brute perdurantism”, “nomological perdurantism”, “phenomenal perdurantism”, and “Quinean perdurantism”. I examine the advantages of these forms of perdurantism, which have not been considered yet, as well as the criticisms that may be advanced against them. I conclude by comparing the positions on the market and then I defend a phenomenal perdurantism which is committed to some form of irreducible self – what I call the “for-me-ness phenomenal perdurantism”. Finally, I discuss the way the introduction of some new account of personal persistence, and in particular, the defense of a perdurantist approach to personal persistence can have important consequences on the moral and practical level.