Persons as Properties: Motivation and Consequences

Miljana Milojevic (University of Belgrade)

The ALEF research group (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) announces an online talk by Miljana Milojević (University of Belgrade) entitled "Persons as Properties: Motivation and Consequences". The talk is part of the group's regular seminar and takes place on Friday, FEBRUARY 25, 18.00 EET (Eastern European Time). Please write to [email protected] or check our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ALEF-100692348488914) if you want to participate. For more information about ALEF, as well as the schedule for the seminar in the 2021-2022 winter semester, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/alefgroupcluj.

Here is the abstract of the talk:

In this talk I will offer a new account of personhood and personal persistence conditions. The novelty of the defended account consists in treating persons as properties rather than as distinct entities or concrete individuals. In the first part of the talk I will focus on the motivation for the defended view and on possible arguments in favour of the opposing view. In the second part of the talk I will present the main metaphysical commitments of the new account. Also, I will argue that the adoption of this view can resolve many of the problems produced in the debate between psychological and biological accounts of personhood. In the end, I will consider some of the possible negative consequences of the proposed view, mainly those pertaining to the change of meaning and use of person-terms.