Personal Ontology
Mystery and Its Consequences

Presents the main competing accounts of personal ontology: that we are either souls, or we are composite physical objects of some sort.

Andrew Brenner (Author)

9781009367073, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 March 2024

250 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.51 kg

'A metaphysical anthropology in the tradition of analytic philosophy … The text is rigorous in its analytical logic and engages much of the recent and important Anglo-American literature on the subject … Recommended.' J. Sienkiewicz, Choice

What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposites. Brenner also examines arguments for and against the existence of the self, offers a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of several afterlife scenarios - resurrection, reincarnation, and mind uploading -- and considers whether agnosticism with respect to personal ontology should lead us to agnosticism with respect to the possibility of life after death.

1. Introduction
2. Arguments against substance dualism – Part 1
3. Arguments against substance dualism – Part 2: Pairing problems
4. Arguments for substance dualism
5. Interlude: what exactly is the difference between our being immaterial souls and our being composite physical objects?
6. Non-Self – Part 1: Arguments against our existence
7. Non-Self – Part 2: The self exists
8. Personal ontology and life after death – Part 1: Resurrection, Reincarnation
9. Personal ontology and life after death – Part 2: Mind uploading
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]