The Robust First-Person Perspective: the Criterion of Human Personality from the Lynne Rudder Baker's Point of View

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD student of comparative philosophy, University of Qom, Qom, Iran

2 Professor of Comparative Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Islamic Theology, University of Qom, Qom, Iran

3 Professor of Philosophy, Department of Ethics, University of Qom, Qom, Iran.

10.22061/orj.2023.1839

Abstract

Philosophers of the mind, based on various approaches to the problem of the mind, have proposed different criteria about human personality, "person" or "I". One of these criteria is having a first-person perspective. One of the proponents of this criteria is Lynne Rudder Baker, a non-reductionist materialist philosopher who considers human personality neither as an immaterial soul nor as reducing it over to physical things. According to her, a robust first-person perspective is sufficient and necessary condition for being a person. A being is a person if and only if it has the capacity for a first-person perspective. The robust first-person perspective is the ability to conceive of oneself as oneself, without the use of any name or description. It is same self-consciousness that distinguishes a person from other beings. In contrast, there is a rudimentary first-person perspective, which is specific to beings who, despite having consciousness, lack the self-consciousness feature. The present article has evaluated and criticized the Baker's point of view on first-person perspective with analytical and critical methodology. Ambiguity in the nature of the first-person perspective and being a person, an absence of argument for some claims and lack adequately clarity on some preconditions and presuppositions are some criticisms that were propounded ‌on the acceptability and coherence of Baker's view.

Keywords


Baker, L. B, “Beyond the Cartesian Self”, Phenomenology and Mind. 2011; 1: 59-71.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, "From Consciousness to Self-Consciousness". Grazer Philosophische Studien. 2012; 84: 19–38.
 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, "Christians Should Reject Mind-Body Dualism". Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, Edited by Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon: Blackwell Publishing; 2005a.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, "Death and the Afterlife". The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion. Edited by William J. Wainwright. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005b. P. 366-391.
ـــــــــــــــ, Naturalism and the first-person perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2013.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2000.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, the Metaphysics of Everyday Life; an Essay in Practical Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2007.
Blatti S. Animalism. 2019. Available from: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/animalism/
Corcoran K. Why Should a Christian Embrace Materialism (About Human Persons). In: Loose J., Menuge A. and J. P. Moreland (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism". Wiley Blackwell; 2018. P. 285-295.
DeGrazia D, “Are we Essentially Persons? Olson, Baker, and a Reply”. The Philosophical Forum, 2002; XXXIII (1): 101-120.
Gaetano A. “The First-Person Perspective Requirement in Pretense”. Phenomenology and Mind. 2014; 7: 224-234.
Hasker W. "The Philosophy of Lynne Rudder Baker". Religious Studies Review. 2019; 45 (1): 29-35.
Hershenov D. B. “Problems with a Constitution Account of Persons”. Dialogue. 2009; 48 (02): 291-312.
Inman R. “Against Constitutionalism”. In: Jonathan J. L. Angus J. L. Menuge and J. P. Moreland (eds) "The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism"; 2018. P. 351-367.
Khazaei, Z. and Nasihatkon, F., Constitution view and a materialistic interpretation of life after death (Lynn Ruther Baker's point of view), Religious Thought, 2017; 17 (1): 86-104. Persian.
Levine, Joseph, On Baker on the First Person, in: Common Sense Metaphysics, Luis R.G. Oliveira and Kevin J. Corcoran (eds), New York and London, Routledge, P. 176-193.
Menuge, A. The First-Person Perspective Is Not a Mere Mental Property. Philosophia Christi. 2018; 20 (1): 67-72.
Rowlands M. From the Inside: Consciousness and the FirstPerson Perspective. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 2008; 16 (3): 281–297.
Sanaei, A. & Shamohammdi, R., The Critical Analysis of the Lynne Rudder Baker’s Theory on Resurrection According to Transcendent Theosophy. Philosophy of Religion Research. 2014; 12 (1): 127-148. Persian.
Shoemaker S. The First-Person Perspective and other essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1996.
ــــــــــــــــــــ, The First-Person Perspective. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 1994; 68 (2): 7-22.
Weber M. “Baker’s First-Person Perspectives: They Are Not What They Seem”. Phenomenology and Mind. 2016; (7): 120-127.
Zahavi D. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person. Cambridge: the MIT Press; 2006.
ــــــــــــــ, First-person thoughts and embodied self-awareness: Some reflections on the relation between recent analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 2002; Vol. 1; No. 1; 7-26.
Zakeri, M. Baker’s Theory of Constitution and the Relations between Things, Metaphysik, 2017; 9 (1): 51-67. Persian.
Zakeri, M. The Constitution View of Human Persons, Existence & Knowledge, 2020; 7 (1): 85-106. Persian.
Zimmerman D. "Christians Should Affirm Mind- Body Dualism". in: Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon (eds) Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing; 2005; 315-327.