The Plurality of the Self

The Plurality of the Self 3 out a philosophical space in which it is literally true both that I would go with my transplanted brain, and that I existed as a pre-conscious foetus.If I am successful, this will allow Lockeans to accept that we are literally and strictly speaking animals, and it will remove a potential objection to Lockeanism, namely that it does not allow us to make such a claim.But how is this possible?The answer cannot be that I am one thing that is both Lockean person and animal -since, as we have seen, a Lockean person cannot be identical to an animal.So my proposed solution is that there are two thinking entities at my location, a Lockean person and a human animal, and that my use of the pronoun 'I' is ambiguous in its reference between these two entities.Informally, we might say that I am not one thing, but two.We must be careful, though, not to take this slogan literally, since there is no disambiguation of 'I' on which it is true of me that I am two things: rather, there is a disambiguation on which I am an animal, and a disambiguation on which I am a Lockean person.Perhaps the main objection to this position is that it (supposedly) means that there are at least two thinkers, with two minds, at my location, and that this would give rise to spurious epistemological worries about which one of them is really me.This problem -the too-many-thinkers problem -is at the heart of Olson's (2003) thinking animal argument for animalism.I will show how my theory can meet this objection.My view does indeed entail a sense in which there are (at least) two thinkers at my location.But, I argue, this is not in itself a problem.The important thing is that on my view there are not two minds at my location.There is only one mind, or one stream of consciousness -but there are two overlapping entities whose mind it is, and which, in their own different ways, are thinking my thoughts.I also develop an account of first-person reference to support this view.A note on the scope of my claims about personal identity: they are not intended to apply to all possible persons (or even to all actual persons), but to human persons -and, by extension, to the persons of non-human animals, if there are any.Primarily, my thesis is a claim about myself: that my use of the first-person pronoun can refer to two things, namely

Existential quantification · Position (finance) · Pronoun · Reflexive pronoun · Self · Slogan · Space (punctuation) · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics