Person and Object by Roderick M. Chisholm (review)

496 BOOK REVIEWS Person and Object. By RODERICK M. CHISHOLM. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976. Pp. 230. $10.95. This book, the Carus lectures of R. M. Chisholm, is divided among four chapters and five appendices. The first three chapters set out the author's philosophical positions on personal identity and selfhood, metaphysical agency, puzzles involving persistence through time and change. The final chapter explains and defends the author's ontological basis: states of affairs. The appendices are related to each of the chapters. The first four offer the author's theoretical foundations for his philosophical positions. The fifth summarizes and sets out the definition used earlier. The whole treatment in chapters and appendices is clear, patient, and ingenious. Many areas developed represent perfected theories stated earlier in the author's writings. The book, then, is in a sense a summary of views already stated and, in some instances, corrections of earlier formulations. There is, however, a single chapter, the first, which sets forth a fascinating argument for which both validity and soundness are claimed. This argument deals with individuation and awareness of the self. It represents a significant departure from contemporary analytic tradition and is so important as regards the scope of the book that the remainder of this review will deal with this argument, carefully examining the claims made by the author for validity and soundness . The author's principal claim in regard to self-awareness, against both the analytic and phenomenological positions on self-awareness, is that persons, or rational subjects, have a direct acquaintance with themselves by virtue of an awareness, clear or obscure, of an individual concept or an individual essence. An individual concept is a property which can be possessed by only one entity at a time, such as " husband of X " or " wife of X " in a monogamous society. An individual essence or haecceity is a property necessarily possessed at all times by one entity alone. Thus two things may have the same individual concept successively, but only one individual thing ever has a given haecceity and has this omnitemporally and necessarily . The means by which these individual concepts and essences ground self-awareness is by their involvement in the individual's awareness of certain self-presenting states, states whose very occurrence implies that their subject is aware of them and whose presence makes of them the most reasonable objects of his belief or acceptance at that time. One thinks automatically of the self-presentations of Brentano or of the perceptual judgments attendant on protocol statements. But these are not the only examples of self-presenting states; and it is wise to bear this in mind lest it seem that the author is offering a phenomenalist position in regard to self-awareness: that the self is known as a peculiar kind of phenomenon, BOOK REVIEWS 497 albeit different from something like a sense datum. This is contrary to the nature of both the self and the self-awareness which the author discovers in his analysis. Arguing against a background of Humean and Kantian denial that the self is a datum in perception or even discoverable by reference to it, the author sets out his own doctrine of self-apprehension by means of an Aristotelian reductive argument. To the inspection of this argument we now turn. A resume of it (p. 82) is as follows. (1) We individuate or pick out certain individual things. (2) Our individuation of any entity is either by relation to something else (per aliud) or is individuation per se. (8) A wholly relational view of individuation is either viciously regressive or viciously circular and thus gives no account of the fact stated in (1). Therefore, (4) something is individuated as such, or per se. This argument appears to be valid. Is it also sound? Since (4) follows from (1)-(8) it is to these that we must look. (2) merely spells out individuation options: either per se or not per se (per aliud). The circle and the regress leave us with the alternatives when it is not. This leaves us with (1) and (8). Let us see what happens when we deny either, beginning with the denial of (8...