Dualistic Ontology of the Human Person

Philosophia Workshops, Workshop Ontology

Miroslaw Szatkowski ________________________________________________ Introduction What does it mean to be a person? What is necessary, and what suffices for something to count as a person, as opposed to a non-person? Are there any non-human persons besides human persons? Assuming after Descartes, Locke and Hume that being rational, intelligent, and self-conscious suffices to be a person, it would be possible to treat God (or gods), angels, and inorganic artefacts – if one believes in their existence – as representatives of non-human persons. Someone who believes in these beings also believes that their metaphysical nature is different from ours. Therefore, what constitutes a human person metaphysically? Are we animals, material things constituted by animals, brains, temporal parts, bundles, souls, or nothing (i.e., we do not exist)? The answers to these terribly (not to say devilishly) difficult questions are extremely varied, since they depend upon the answers to further questions; for example, whether rational, intelligent and self-conscious beings are material or immaterial, simple or composite, persisting or momentary ? Moreover there are no non-controversial definitions for many of these metaphysical terms. More generally, there is no single problem of human personhood, but rather a wide range of – more or less – connected questions of metaphysics and of the philosophy of mind. It should be added that the question: What is a person? is also the subject of such fields of study as theology, psychology, sociology, law, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology. Thus, from the exclusively metaphysical point of view, the answers to the above questions reflect the choice of two opposite ontological stances, namely ontological monism and ontological pluralism. Ontological monism is the view that everything that is real is one and only one kind of thing, whereas ontological pluralism is the doctrine that many kinds of things make up reality, with each doctrine actually existing in several different versions. Ontological dualism is a limited form of pluralism. It is the view that everything that exists in reality is physical or mental (spiritual), material or immaterial, body or mind. Physical (material, bodily) things are known through sensual observation, whereas mental (spiritual, immaterial) things can be known only through introspection. Dualism can be contrasted with monism, and also with pluralism. Strictly speaking, a denial of dualism is not monism or pluralism, but nondualism, although authors differ on the question of the inequivalence of nondualism and monism. It seems important to also mention two extreme doctrines: naive realism, according to which everything that we consider real varies depending on how we speak about the world; and nihilism, which postulates that nothing ought to be considered real. The dualistic ontology of the human person may be viewed as a specific case of ontological dualism. The dualistic view of the human person is not simply the claim that apart from the material body there exists also the immaterial mind or soul, but it also assumes that the material body and the immaterial mind together define the human person. One of the most obvious problems with body/mind dualism is to explain how the mind can interact with the body. The important questions are: How persons retain their individuality? Do persons remain the same over time and how does it happen? While working on the book: Dualistic Ontology of the Human Person, the authors (all but one) met in Warsaw on February 20 – 21, 2012 at the Ontological Workshop: E. J. Lowe’s Dualistic Ontology of the Human Person. The major goal was to get to know each other better and discuss some of the issues of the ontology of the human person, with the special focus on the solutions proposed by E. J. Lowe. The organizers of the Workshop wanted to recognize the contribution of Prof. E. J. Lowe to formal ontology in general, and to the