The Bounds of Agency : : An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics / / Carol Rovane.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Rovane, Carol,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [1997]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 1997
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Legacy Library ; 5567
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (304 p.) :; 1 line drawing

The subject of personal identity is one of the most central and most contested and exciting in philosophy. Ever since Locke, psychological and bodily criteria have vied with one another in conflicting accounts of personal identity. Carol Rovane argues that, as things stand, the debate is unresolvable since both sides hold coherent positions that our common sense will embrace. Our very common sense, she maintains, is conflicted; so any resolution to the debate is bound to be revisionary. She boldly offers such a revisionary theory of personal identity by first inquiring into the nature of persons.Rovane begins with a premise about the distinctive ethical nature of persons to which all substantive ethical doctrines, ranging from Kantian to egoist, can subscribe. From this starting point, she derives two startling metaphysical possibilities: there could be group persons composed of many human beings and multiple persons within a single human being. Her conclusion supports Locke's distinction between persons and human beings, but on altogether new grounds. These grounds lie in her radically normative analysis of the condition of personal identity, as the condition in which a certain normative commitment arises, namely, the commitment to achieve overall rational unity within a rational point of view. It is by virtue of this normative commitment that individual agents can engage one another specifically as persons, and possess the distinctive ethical status of persons.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- PART I: LESSONS FROMLOCKE Introduction to Part I -- Introduction to Part I -- CHAPTER ONE. Preview of the Normative Analysis of Personal Identity -- CHAPTER TWO. On the Need for Revision -- CHAPTER THREE. A Revisionary Proposal -- PART II: PERSONAL IDENTITY: THE BODY PRACTIC -- Introduction to Part II -- CHAPTER FOUR. A Sufficient Condition for Personal Identity -- CHAPTER FIVE. The Sufficient Condition Is Also Necessary -- CHAPTER SIX. The First Person -- POSTSCRIPT -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX