In ordinary discourse, we speak of people as having bodies without making much fuss about just what this ‘having’ relation is. What does it mean to say that I have a body? The Constitution View offers an answer: For a person to have a body is for the person to be constituted by a body (in the sense of‘constitution’; explicated in Chapter 2). A person is not a separate thing from the constituting body, any more than a statue is a separate thing from the constituting block of marble. Nor is a person identical to the constituting body. The nonidentity of person and body, on the Constitution View, is guaranteed by the fact that any body could exist without a first-person perspective, but no person could exist without a capacity for first-person perspective (in the sense of ‘first-person perspective’ explicated in Chapter 3). Now I shall try to spell out in detail just how human persons are related to their bodies.

WHAT A HUMAN PERSON IS

On the Constitution View, what makes a human person a person is the capacity to have a first-person perspective. What makes a human person a human is being constituted by a human organism.

A first-person perspective is a defining characteristic of all persons, human or not. From a first-person point of view, one can think about oneself as oneself and think about one's thoughts as one's own.