The Person As a Unified Agent

Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt, 1937), 159.Google Scholar

Borden P. Bowne (1864–1910) may be called the founder of American Personalistic Idealism. His basic books are Theory of Thought and Knowledge (1897) and Metaphysics (1882) rev. ed. 1898.Google Scholar

I owe this illustration to C. A. Campbell. See his Selfhood and Godhood (London: Allen and Unwin), 1957).Google Scholar

H. H. Price, “Retrospect,” in Biology and Personality: Frontier Problems in Science, Philosophy and Religion, ed. Ian T. Ramsey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 208. In the same volume see the chapters by John Maynard Smith and Ian Ramsey. See also P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen and Co., 1959), 89 and 94ff.Google Scholar

H. H. Price, Belief (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 232ff.Google Scholar

Edgar S. Brightman, Person and Reality, ed. Peter A. Bertocci in collaboration with Jannette E. Newhall and Robert S. Brightman (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), 35, 36. See also his A Philosophy of Religion (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1940); “The Finite Self,” in Contemporary Idealism in America, ed. Clifford Barrett (New York: Macmillan, 1932). I take this occasion to acknowledge a heavy debt to the teaching and writing of Edgar Sheffield Brightman.Google Scholar

Alfred N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 227, 228.Google Scholar

Zeno Vendler in Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational Psychology (New York: Cornell University Press, 1972), helps to bring needed balance at this critical point. I should still wish to insist that Descartes is defining incontrovertible existence as thinking, not vice-versa, as Vendler himself seems to hold (see 201 f.). My appreciation of Vendler’s study is not decreased by his final decision that “both I’s in I think and Iexist refer to a transcendental I, the I that remains the same throughout my mental history.”Google Scholar

From his essay, “An Agnostic View of Evolution,” in Biology and Personality, ed. Ian T. Ramsey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 58.Google Scholar

H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

The best defenses of this sort of view are to be found in the much too neglected work of F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928; 1970), and of H. D. Lewis, The Elusive Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). For a different perspective, see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 and especially vol. 3 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963). The works of E. L. Mascall, of which The Openness of Being (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971) is an excellent, comprehensive expression, are lucid presentations of a Thomist nontemporalism.Google Scholar

See also my “A Temporalistic View of Personal Mind,” Theories of Mind, ed. Gordon M. Scher (New York: The Free Press, 1962), 398–421; “Susan K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind,” Review of Metaphysics, 23 (March, 1970): 527–551; “The Essence of a Person,” Monist, 61 (Jan. 1978):28–41; “The Person, His Personality, and Environment,” Review of Metaphysics, 32 (June, 1979):605–621.Google Scholar

A. A. Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterialism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), 174, 175.Google Scholar

For discussion of self-identity and memory see S. Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), and H. D. Lewis, The Elusive Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), chapter 10, for a critique of this view. I may further remark that in H. D. Lewis’ book, I find a most telling critique of recent attempts to define mind and its identity in relation to the body; for example, of Ryle, Hirst, Ayer, Strawson, J. C. C. Smart, and S. Shoemaker. Lewis’ careful study of opposing views is exemplary, and the development of his own treatment of “the elusive mind” is compelling. His critique expresses most of my concerns and I can only wish that I had his gift for description and positive construction. Some may find the interchange between H. D. Lewis and myself interesting: see Religious Studies, 15 (1979): 399–408, “Does Elusive Becoming in Fact Characterize H. D. Lewis’ View of the Mind?”Google Scholar