A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality

“A persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,” my beloved editor Dan Frank wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and unrepeatable person, disbanded to return to the universe. And yet despite everything we know about what happens to those atoms when we die, the question of how they cohered into a person — the question of what makes a person, of how the myriad personae within constellate the total personality that moves thro...