What Are We? a Study in Personal Ontology – Eric T. Olson
Maximilian de Gaynesford · The Philosophical Quarterly · 2009
The main aim of the book is to raise a question rather than to answer it, to awaken consciousness of certain problems rather than to resolve them. Olson's contention is that this question –‘What are we?’, which he expresses variously as ‘What are our most general and fundamental features?’, ‘What is our most basic metaphysical nature?’ – is frequently confused with, or flatly ignored in favour of, other issues to which it is evidently related (pre‐eminently issues concerning personal identity), and that answers to the question he is concerned with are routinely overlaid by answers to these other questions. His main task, then, is to distinguish his question from all others, and to impress on us its specificity, the difficulties standing in the way of its resolution, and its significance. This goal will have been achieved, presumably, when the process by which his question has come to be treated as second‐class and subsidiary is reversed, and answers to supposedly more basic questions are no longer expected to provide us with sufficient resources to answer it. Whether this question has indeed been displaced or ignored is a matter for debate, of course. Modern discussion of personal identity seems Lockean in at least one respect: the principal contenders agree that different kinds of thing have different identity‐conditions, and hence that we cannot specify those conditions without first knowing precisely the kind of thing we are dealing with. Perhaps parties to the dispute pay insufficient attention to the complexities surrounding the metaphysics of persons. But to claim that this issue is prior to the issue of their identity is surely to insist on orthodoxy.