Teste pensanti. Identità personale, animali umani e ‘persone residuali’

  • Alfredo Tomasetta
Keywords: Personal identity, animalism, human persons, remnant-persons, Mark Johnston

Abstract

Animalism is the view in personal ontology according to which we are identical with human animals. This paper focuses on a major objection to animalism put forward by Mark Johnston: the remnant-person problem. Your head detached from the rest of your body seems to be a person; now, if s/he is not you, then one can bring a person into being simply by removing tissue from something, and this is absurd. If, on the other hand, s/he is you, then animalism is false. I claim that one can offer a solution to this puzzle by denying the assumption that a detached head is a person, and I want to show that this can be done without assuming very controversial philosophical theses.

References

Johnston, Marc (2007), “Human Beings” Revisited: My Body is not an Animal, in Zimmerman, Dean (2007), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York.

Johnston, Marc (2017), Remnant-Persons: Animalism’s Undoing, in Blatti, Stephan e Snowdon, Paul (2017), Animalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York.

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How to Cite
Tomasetta, A. (1) “Teste pensanti. Identità personale, animali umani e ‘persone residuali’”, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 00. Available at: http://160.97.104.70/index.php/rifl/article/view/523 (Accessed: 28March2024).
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Articles