Abstract

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To construct a naturalistic account of the human person which takes full account of the way in which the person is different from a material object, we appear to need a notion of "ontological dependence", or, more precisely, the relation

x is ontologically dependent on h .

This relation tries to lie somewhere between identity on the one hand and complete ontological independence on the other. The idea that the person is distinct from, but ontologically dependent on, the material body, lies therefore between pure monism (identity) and pure dualism (ontological independence). A first, informal attempt to capture what the relation consists in is:

a is OD on b Û (the vanishing of b in itself constitutes the vanishing of a) Ù Ø(a=b)

In the case of the person and the body, the OD thesis is that if the body were to vanish, the person must of necessity vanish too. It is important here to stress that the relation between the two vanishings is not causation but identity. To characterise an object as being OD on others we have to establish three things:

• existence - the name-sense in question must refer to an object;
• distinctness - the new object must not simply be identical to one of the old ones;
• dependence - the new object must retain the OD link to some of the old ones.

These issues can be explored by looking at various putative examples of the relation.

When considering the properties of the world, we can distinguish between the fundamental ones, those which are "put in at the beginning" and which are always there, and the emergent ones, which appear under special circumstances and which are different from the fundamental properties but can be derived from them. Major examples of emergence are often associated with separate sciences which came into being to study them. Thus we can speak of:

• the emergence of chemical behaviour out of physical laws,
• the emergence of organic chemistry out of the generality of chemical behaviour,
• the emergence of life out of organic chemistry,
• the emergence of sentience out of life,
• the emergence of personhood out of sentience.

In some cases the emergence of new properties is also accompanied by the emergence of new sorts of objects as bearers of the new properties. Thus chemical properties are the attributes of chemical substances. Personhood is an attribute of persons. Chemical substances and persons are objects distinct from but ontologically dependent on physical objects.

Sometimes the novelty introduced by emergence is so great that we seem to have more than simply new features and new objects. It is instead almost as if a whole new world has emerged. The word "transcendence" is used here to denote this strongest form of emergence. The intended meaning is illustrated by two examples (possibly the only two examples we know of):

• the emergence of life, with its Darwinian dynamic,
• the emergence of personhood, with the dynamic associated with human volition.

The underlying physical world is characterised by a dynamic which is made up of entirely efficient causation. Darwinism can be described as constituting an emergent demi-teleology, and with the advent of human persons a fully teleology has emerged. The emergence of final causation out of a purely efficient ontological basis is sufficiently radical a change to warrant the description "transcendence".

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