The Identities of Persons ed. by Amelie Oskenberg Rorty (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 347 artificial functional TDs, and biological functional TDs. Purposive TDs and artificial functional TDs appeal to goals, which are intentional objects, being apparent goods; behavioral functional TDs and biological functional TDs appeal to actual goods, which are more or less identified with individual or species survival. Woodfield's work, like Wright's, is knowledgeable, up-to-date, and polemical . Because of smaller print, in addition to the greater number of pages, it is more' than twice as long. Whereas Wright's volume contains only a brief index of names, Woodfield's has both an adequate index and a select bibliography. However, both volumes constitute significant statements in the venerable search for a better understanding of teleology, and both are recommended. University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas LOWELL NIBSEN The Identities of Persons. Edited by AMELIE OsKENBERG RoRTY. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Pp. 337. $14.50 cloth; $4.85 paperback. This collection of articles written by a number of senior philosophers and assembled by Amelie Rorty will probably not be of interest to those with just a casual interest in philosophical questions. These writers deal with such questions as the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the class of persons, the physical and psychological traits that distinguish members of this class from members of other classes, the specific traits, qualities , and relationships deemed necessary for survival of a continuant person , and the various psychological and moral components of the responsible person. The various candidates for the " I," self, or person are introduced in this work, and the problems encountered in espousing any candidate are reviewed. Introduction of empirical candidates, for instance, runs the risk of establishing a protean entity as the self, and the introduction of moral or non-physical candidates runs the risk of their being defined as a " something-perhaps-a-nothing-I-know-not-what ", or a simple soul existing beyond experience. Personhood is often identified with traits and characteristics that survive through time. David Lewis argues what is essential to personhood is the connectedness and continuity of mental experiences. One's present mental states should be a momentary stage in a continuing succession of stages (p. 18). These stages should be connected by bond of similarity and by laws of causal dependence'. Crucial to survival of the person is the identity of 848 BOOK REVIEWS that stage which presently exists with that stage which will exist in the future. Lewis defends this twofold answer to one problem in the rest of his article by claiming that the aggregate of relation-related person stages is the continuant peTson. He identifies the relation-relatedness of person stages with the identity-relatedness relationship of these stages, and this identification enables him to claim that the presently existing stage of a person's existence need not necessarily be a stage of one single continuant person. And his definition of the person as an aggregation of interrelated stages enables him to define individuals that only retain degrees of relatedness as persons. Lewis's proposals have the distinct advantage of not justifying the existence of more persons than should reasonably be asserted, and it eliminates the possibility of overpopulation in the enumeration of persons. Georges Rey suggests that persons may survive and yet not continue to exist, meaning that two different persons may survive from one previously existing individual. He argues that what is of concern to a person's survival is the " not necessarily identical continuity of our functional personal embodiment" (p. 59). It is not sufficient to identify the person with a continuity of psychological states, memories, or recollections, for the person is the physical embodiment of these states. This is what is preserved through states of fission, fusion, dream states, amnesia and other states. He argues that a person may undergo profound psychological change, lose all memory of past experiences, relations, and identities, and still survive because a continuity in the functional personal embodiment remains. Thus, something akin to habits of behavior, patterns of action, or behavioral embodiments marks the distinctiveness of persons. The notable difficulty with this view, however, is the problem of precisely defining the functions of personal embodiment. John Perry argues that Locke...