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16 - Assimilation and Homogenization

from Part III - Toward Disabling the Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2019

John M. Rist
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

In the eighteenth century, as we have noticed, God gradually disappears from philosophical reflection on human nature, the soul tending to be replaced by the mind or self. But these too gradually begin to be dissolved; already a number of thinkers are proposing to explain mental activity entirely in material terms, the mind being regarded as an epiphenomenon of the brain. And since for hundreds of years, ever since late antiquity, the soul had been understood not only in terms of a form of the body or as the real ‘I’ as well as more theologically as the bearer (whether or not naturally) of human immortality in a theistic universe, it is hardly surprising that reflection on the soul became transmuted into discussion of the self. Nevertheless, generally in the eighteenth century the self was still treated as a substance, albeit the accounts of the person proposed by Locke and his successors had introduced the reduction of both the self and the person to convenient illusions.

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Chapter
Information
What is a Person?
Realities, Constructs, Illusions
, pp. 156 - 167
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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