Animalism

Are there dead persons?

“…That, in turn, generates the Corpse Problem, widely taken to present a serious challenge to animalism (e.g. Carter 1999; Olson 2004; Árnadóttir 2013; Campbell and McMahan 2016; Shoemaker 2016). If each of us is identical with a human animal, and if the identity and persistence conditions of animals are fixed by organic functioning, then there are no dead animals: nothing that is an animal at t is also dead at t .…”

“…Notoriously, each position coheres with many of our prereflective judgments about who is and isn’t a person, but deliver troublingly counterintuitive answers on others. Neo-Lockeans typically have to deny that newborn babies and permanently non-conscious patients count as persons, in the face of both widespread assumptions and person-regarding legal and social practices, whereas Animalists run into problems with both hypothetical brain transplants and real-world conjoined twins (Campbell and McMahan 2016) and ‘split-brain’ patients (Snowdon 2016). An account of personal identity that captures everyone we intuitively want to count as a person – that is, one that maps maximally onto the picture of practical identity that motivates questions about personal identity in the first place – is thus something of an undeclared holy grail of personal identity theory.…”

The problems of life after death

“…Although they may be developed in four-dimensionalist terms; see, for example, Hershenov (2016) and Toner (2011). 29 It should be noted that stage theorists and worm theorists think that time is continuous, and these temporal parts are infinitely divisible.…”