Umeå Studies in the Humanities 143

Persons — Their Identity and Individuation

Roger Melin

This book is about the nature of persons and personal identity. It belongs to a tradition that maintains that in order to understand what it is to be person we must clarify what personal identity consists in. The author divides the problem of personal identity into two problems (i) How do persons persist? and (ii) What facts, if any, does personal identity consist in?

Concerning the first question, the author argues that persons persist three-dimensionally (the endurance view), and not four-dimensionally (the perdurance view), on the ground that objects must always fall under some substance sortal concept S (the sortal dependency of individuation), and that the concept person entails that objects falling under it are three-dimensional.

Concerning the second question, the author differentiates between Criterianism, the view that is possible to specify a non-circular and informative criterion for personal identity, and Non-Criterianism, which denies that such a specification is possible. He argues against Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they are either (i) circular, (ii) violate the intrinsicality of identity or (iii) do not adequately represent what we are essentially. The author further criticises three Psychological Non-Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they wrongly assume that ‘person’ refers to mental entities.

Instead the author formulates the Revised Animal Attribute View where person is understood as a basic sortal concept which picks out a biological sort of enduring animals. In this, he claims that the real essence of a person is determined by the real essence of the kind of animal the person is, without thereby denying that persons have a real essence as persons.