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existing theories of personal identity. What is important and instructive is that these theories in one way or the other provided a rational explication of the identity of the human person, either biologically, psychologically, physically or a combination of two of the aforementioned. This research shall therefore delve into the analysis of these theories, examining their merits and demerits.
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theories, in short, are physical (biological) links, not psychological connections.311
From Gorkum‘s analysis above, it means there is more than one version of the physical theory.
In fact, it is broadly divided into two parts—the body criterion and the somatic criterion. This research shall analyze each of these beginning with the body criterion.
4.2.1 (a). Bodily Criterion
The bodily criterion holds that the spatio-temporal continuity of a functioning human body constitutes personal identity.312 Advocates of this thought are Williams (1956-7; 1970) and Thomson (1997). For them the cardinal requirement for personal identity is the functioning human body. A person stage-A at t1 is the same as a person stage-B att2 if both possess or have resemblance of the same body. Bleich while reflecting on Rashi‘s argument states that:
Personal identity is a product of a cause and effect relationship. Change certainly does occur in the course of human development and maturation but where there is no baby, there would be no adolescent, where there is no adolescent, there would be no adult. The baby, in a very significant sense, is the cause of the adolescent and the adolescent is the cause of the adult. That causal nexus gives rise both to personal identity and to identity as a member of a species because, despite any physical change that may occur, the cause is always present in its effect. Accordingly, the mother is present in her offspring and hence the offspring shares in the species of its progenitor.313
Though the argument seems to fall into what Martin & Barresi (2003) called the simple view of personal identity relation, the cause and effect relationship introduced into the argument to defend the bodily criterion is superbly ingenious.
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By and large, the hallmark and first view of our identity is our body. This is a sensory perception of the self. It goes with the empiricists‘ tradition that ―nothing in the intellect or mind that was not first on the senses.‖ This implies that we must first observe and experience the body before we can cognize or innately experience the self. The inner experience(s) of an individual or being is not what appears first to the senses. Virtually, every object or thing in the cosmic world are first and foremost perceive by the empirical senses. They are first known a posteriori. From these experiences of physical objects through contact of the object‘s corporeal configuration or body, the mind begins to form or have idea of the object‘s identity. Hence, the body as the basis of our identity is almost intuitively plausible because it is the commonest and easiest way to identify a human being and to distinguish him or her from others. That a person can persist over time without the body has been denied by this criterion. That there is an increase or a decrease in size of the body structure is not sufficient to deny that the body is something that can persist over time. Thus, to answer the question— what does being the person or being that you are from one day to the next necessarily consists of may be answered by referring to the body as means of the continuity of the self.
The next crucial question is: what change(s) can the body survive? Is there something about the body that remains or that is unaltered over time? Is it the case that when a person experiences increase or decrease in the size of his body structure, the person ceases or stops existing?
However, these questions seem to have been dispensed with or to put it in another way has been sufficiently answered on the grounds that the spatio-temporal continuity of a functioning human body constitutes personal identity.314 This view has been robustly canvassed by Williams (1956-7; 1970) and Thomson (1997). The cardinal point of their argument as we shall discuss later is
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that the functioning human body is necessary and sufficient to constitute personal identity. It follows that we are nothing outside of our body.
In philosophy, some of the post Husserlian and Heideggeran phenomenologists, especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty has described the body as an essential instrument for the cognition/perception and understanding of human experiences. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that our physical body is not experienced by us as an object among other objects in space, rather as humans we have been inserted into the world in a very special, organic way, determined by the nature of our sensory and motor capacities to perceive the world in a specific way.315 He arrived at this by drawing on Husserl‘s distinction between the inanimate physical body and the living animate body. He argued further that there is no distinction between my subsistence—that is, the being that will live now and survive the next day and my embodiment. As Moran describes it:
Merleau-Ponty‘s notion of one‘s own or proper body (le corps proper) has some anticipations in Bergson‘s discussion of the body in the opening chapter of Matter and Memory, in Marcel‘s discussion in his Metaphysical Journal of the manner in which I am my body as opposed to having a body (PP 174n.; 203n.), and seems especially to be a critical meditation on Sartre‘s chapter on the body in Being and Nothingness (BN 303-359) where Sartre uses the verb ‗to exist‘ in a transitive manner to form such novel expressions as ―I exist my body‖ (BN 329; 378), ―I live my body‖
(BN 325; 373), to show that there is no separation between my existence and my embodiment.316
In a rather more plausible way, Gabriel Marcel‘s phenomenological description of the body as entity that makes me ‗me‘ and not something I possess, a sort of ‗ownership‘ or object, distinctly captures the imperativeness and role of the body in the determination of personal identity.
Sweetman presented this argument thus:
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Marcel argued that people‘s relationships to their own bodies is not one of typical ―ownership‖, and so the fact of human embodiment presents a difficulty for any philosophy, such as Cartesianism, that wishes to place the fact of embodiment in doubt. It is thus incorrect to understand embodiment in terms of ownership, or to say that people ―possess‖ their bodies as instruments; it is more accurate to say instead that ―I am my body,‖ by which Marcel meant that one cannot look upon one‘s body as an object or as a problem to be solved, because the logical detachment that is required to do so cannot be achieved. Indeed, as soon as I consider my body as an object, it ceases to be ―my body‖, because the nature of conceptual thought requires detachment from the object under analysis.
Nor, however, can I regard my bodily experiences as the sum total of my life.317
This is in tandem with the theory of sexism, masculinity and feminism. A male or female individual is first given such identification through the physical inspection of the individual‘s body—male or female or biological reproductive organs. This is the basis of gender classification. The natural biological sex organ of an individual determines the person‘s identity as either male or female over time. One cannot for a while exist as a male and thereafter at another time exists as a female. Though recent arguments have emerged to counter this view, how successful and intuitively plausible are the arguments is a matter of much debate. In fact, the issue of transgender has become a subject of hot debate. Some persons have come to argue that their natural biological sex organ is neither sufficient nor intuitively plausible to determine their identities as male or female. It is argued that to determine a person‘s gender (as male or female) through the observation of the individual‘s natural sex organ is counter-intuitive. Focus is shifted from the physical or natural biological sex organ of an individual in the determination of one‘s gender to one‘s inner awareness or feelings.
The crux of the argument according to this theory is that it is only the individual that can determine his or her own identity as a male or female through his or her inner or introspective experiences or intuition. It is believed that one‘s inclination of the self must conform to one‘s
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inner experiences and from these experiences one is at liberty to choose one‘s gender instead of the supposedly ―nature imposed‖. The choice of one‘s gender is believed to correlate with the liberal principle and respect for individual cognitive ability and self-awareness or awareness of the self. It means that whatever one feels on the inside, contrary to one‘s natural biological configuration, is what matters in the determination of one‘s identity as a male or female. So, the physical body is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine how one persists over time.
4.2.1. (b). Somatic Criterion
The somatic criterion, on the other hand holds that the spatio-temporal continuity of the metabolic and other life-sustaining organs of a functioning human animal constitutes personal identity.318 Proponents of this view are Mackie (1999); Olson (1997a, 1997b); Snowdon (1991, 1995 & 1996). Though the similarity of the bodily criterion and somatic criterion has been argued, everything depends on how the notions of ―functioning human body‖ and ―life-sustaining organs‖ are understood.319
What are we? This is a question that cannot be straightforwardly answered. The issues and the contending issues are numerous— the various agreement and disagreement among defenders and contenders neither leave one with choice nor has it provided a clear and distinct solution to the ongoing debate of personal identity, re-identification of the self and the persistence question of human beings. The claims and counter claims that we are identical to animals is exemplified in this quote thus: ―some say we are essentially animals, others say we are only contingently animals; some say we could survive disembodiment, others deny this; some say animalism is a species of materialism but others explicitly reject materialism and even say that we have souls;
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some say that our persistence conditions are biological— tied to our animal nature— while others say it is the continuance of our psychology that is key to our survival.‖320
Some of the elements of the animalist position (a version of the somatic criterion) may be found in Aristotle‘s ontology and analysis of man but in terms of personal identity‘s debate in recent time ―the foundations were laid by David Wiggins (1967, 1980), who forcefully rejected John Locke‘s (1975) distinction between persons and animals in support of a proto-animalist position he called the ‗animal attribute theory‘. Subsequently, the animalist view has been developed by Michael Ayers, William Carter, David Mackie, Eric Olson, Paul Snowdon, Peter Van Inwagen, Wiggins, and Richard Wollheim among others.‖321
The claim of the animalist is that each of us is identical with a human animal. This follows that each of us is essentially and fundamentally an animal. ―The claim that we are essentially animals implies that we could not exist except as animals, while the claim that we are most fundamentally animals suggests that the conditions of our persistence derive from our status as animals. Since these persistence conditions are often supposed to be biological in character, animalism is sometimes referred to as the ‗biological view‘ or the ‗organism view‘.‖322
Andrew M. Bailey, one of the proponents of the animalism argument, argues that ―animalism is at once a bold metaphysical theory and a pedestrian biological observation. For, according to animalists, human persons are organisms; we are members of a certain biological species.‖323 In addition, Bailey sums up his argument concerning whether we are animals or not by introducing some heretofore unnoticed data concerning the interlocking interests of human persons and human organisms and then shows that the data support animalism, which result turns out to be a novel and powerful argument for animalism; that bold or pedestrian, animalism is true.324
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Amidst the sundry claims of animalism, Allison Thornton has come out to argue that ―there are different varieties of animalism, differing with respect to which other theses are taken in conjunction with animalism in its basic form. The different varieties of animalism vary in credibility: some varieties are supported by arguments that are irrelevant to others, and some varieties are susceptible to objections that others can resist. Adequately distinguishing between varieties of animalism is thus an important preliminary to assisting them . . . he thus argued for a taxonomy of the most distinctive varieties.‖325
That we are human animals have been heavily contested. Here this research shall briefly present some criticisms against animalism and also some defences of animalism and end up with practical applications of animalism, drawing from Matt Duncan‘s analysis and review of the animalism debate in Stephan Blatti and Paul F. Snowdon‘s edited essay.