Other Human Beings

The author argues that a metaphysical view of persons cannot be separated from those attitudes which are expressive of a recognition that another is a person.

He rejects the idea that the first person point of view is the key to what is of value in our thought about persons and the closely linked idea that the third person world is the world of the physical sciences.

He suggests that the philosophical mind/body contrast continues to play a seriously distorting role in discussions of the nature and value of persons and, in particular, of their identity through time.

What is needed is an acknowledgement of the tangible, persisting "human being" - a being with a distinctive bodily form having its own distinctive kind of value - as a fundamental feature of our thought.