Person and Object; a Metaphysical Study

by Roderick M. Chisholm

Leibniz, Reid, Brentano and many other philosophers have held that, by considering certain obvious facts about ourselves, we can arrive at an understanding of the general principles of metaphysics. The present book is intended to confirm this view. One kind of philosophical puzzlement arises when we have an apparent conflict of intuitions. If we are philosophers, we then try to show that the apparent conflict of intuitions is only an apparent conflict and not a real one. If we fail, we may have to say that what we took to be an apparent conflict of intuitions was in fact a conflict of apparent intuitions, and then we must decide which of the conflicting intuitions is only an apparent intuition. But if we succeed, then both of the intuitions will be preserved. Since there was an apparent conflict, we will have to conclude that the formulation of at least one of the intuitions was defective. And though the formulation may be imbedded in our ordinary language, we will have to say that, strictly and philosophically, a different formulation is to be preferred. But to make it clear that we are not rejecting the intuition we are reformulating, we must show systematically how to interpret the ordinary formulation into the philosophical one. The extent to which we can show this will be one mark our success in dealing with philosophical puzzle. Another will be the extent to which our proposed solution contributes to the solution of still other philosophical puzzles.

Genres: Philosophy, Metaphysics

Hardcover

First published November 11, 1976

About the author

Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception. He was often called "the philosopher's philosopher.

Chisholm graduated from Brown University in 1938 and received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C. Williams. He was drafted into the United States Army in July 1942 and did basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. Chisholm administered psychological tests in Boston and New Haven. In 1943 he married Eleanor Parker, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Brown. He spent his academic career at Brown University and served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1973.

Chisholm trained many distinguished philosophers, including Selmer Bringsjord, Fred Feldman, Keith Lehrer, James Francis Ross, Richard Taylor, and Dean Zimmerman. He also had a significant influence on many colleagues, including Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa.

Reviews

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roderick Chisholm is one of the clearest and most concise philosophers I've read. It is too often the case that a philosopher starts rambling with little structure to their presentation so that any enlightenment gained through the book seems almost incidental, and uses terms inconsistently so that you lose the train of thought because the same word is being used to mean different concepts.

Analytic philosophy developed in the early 1900s as a reaction to this unclear mumbo jumbo, but I blame folks like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege for making most contemporary philosophy almost unreadable today by those of us who are not experts in symbolic logic. But they meant well! By using predicate logic as their primary method, they felt they could expose errors in proposed solutions to philosophical problems, and so this is the primary way you see philosophy written today. Entire sentences are translated down to logical atomism that only trained academics can parse out.

Here, Chisholm takes a hybrid approach. He defines his concepts clearly from the get go, while also specifying which words he will be using broadly. He doesn't assume the reader is an absolute beginner in philosophy, but he reviews the basics of his target subject first to make sure everyone is on the same page before carefully building his own case through the use of logic. He tackled in a fairly accessible way what he saw as fundamental errors in major schools of philosophy going all the way to Hume and Kant that led to the popular conclusion that we can know nothing about the self, the subject, the person, the "I".

And in so doing, he created one of the classics of 20th Century analytic philosophy which could be his masterpiece. Published in 1976 as "Person and Object," the title is a play on W.V.O. Quine's book "Word and Object". Chisholm rejected Quine's solutions to the problems of identity. One of Quine's accepted doctrines said that things exist as temporal parts or "stages." Thus, a river is the sum of momentary river stages. Chisholm disagrees.

One of the ways Chisholm counters such doctrines is by demonstrating how a lot of our metaphysical confusion about self-identity and free will come from our tendency to "play loose" with language. For me, this is one of the main reasons I enjoy his work so much. Chisholm really taught me the importance of clarity in language. I may not still be very good at it, but that's my problem, not his. For example, he was the first to finally get through my head the difference between looking at statements "de re" or "de dicto." So if your daughter says she wants to marry the richest kid in school, what does she mean? If she means "whoever in my school happens to have the most money, that's who I would like to marry," then this is the de dicto interpretation. But she could mean that Johnny, who in fact IS demonstrably the wealthiest student attending her school, is the SPECIFIC person she wants to marry. That's de re.

Using his sharply honed language as his primary weapon, he tackled the question of whether we are the same person today that we were in our past, or whether we are merely a succession of selves that pass on our memories to each other. His best arguments are found in Chapter III "Identity Through Time," considered a classic onto itself, which I first read back in the early 2000s when it was published in the Blackwell Anthology of Metaphysics. His clear and compelling arguments for persons persisting throughout time was what solidified my interest in metaphysical puzzles.

"But Warren, you person of pugnacious persistence, " I hear you ask, "what kind of a puzzle is that? Surely I am the same person I always was, not a bunch of temporary persons passing along memories. That's ridiculous!"

Well, Kant and Locke didn't think so. And they weren't and aren't alone. Persistence of things has been a subject for debate across millennia. Let's return briefly to Quine's idea of "stages." He was trying to answer the ancient question of whether or not we ever step in the same river twice. The same puzzle has been proposed in numerous creative ways over the years. If we restored all the rotten wood of the Ship of Theseus with aluminum, would it still be the same boat? And how can we really be the same person we were yesterday? We age, our bodies change, our opinions change, we are drunk from too many dry martinis the night before but are sober today, we lose functions and abilities we once had, and we learn new skills. The person I was thirty years ago seems to have a whole other set of properties than the person I am now. And what do we mean when we say, "Jackie just isn't the same person she used to be"?

Chisholm solves this by dividing things into "entia per alio" and "entia per se." Things of the first type are entities that must borrow properties of other things. A shadow could be considered "per alio," because it requires an object to be shadowed. But successive entities, "entia successiva," are also per alio, requiring at any moment a thing other than itself to stand in and do duty for it. Like the President of the United States. Today Joe Biden stands in. At other times it was Warren G. Harding or Gerald Ford. But thinking persons are of the latter type, and he elegantly proves this by showing the logical absurdity of transfer of thinking substance, while proposing our parts are entia successiva. So when we say, "Jackie isn't the same person," we are playing loose with the word "same." There wasn't a separate entity, the "old Jackie," and now a new Jackie has succeeded her! Neither have there been multiple Jackies in constant succession passing down her history, nor is she a sum of temporal parts. Perhaps she just was a Democrat and now is a Republican.

So if I'm understanding him correctly, then what I just described goes for you too! After all, your car is still the same car even if you change its tires. The constituent parts are stand-ins. Similarly, your body consists almost entirely of stand-in cells that weren't there when you were 10-years-old, but you are still you!

Speaking of people changing over time, Chisholm was a true philospher in the sense that he was always open to changing his conclusions should a colleague's work or his own show that he was in error. For example, in this book he distinguishes between agent causation and event causation. Later in his career, he concluded that this was false. (Perhaps that Robert Chisholm was a different Robert Chisholm than the one who wrote this book! Hopefully from this summary you can feel more confident in assuming I am joking.) But he remained a champion for the idea that things can be caused to happen by volition of people. His work has been important for later developments in philosophy of mind and self, our understanding of free will, and systems of legal judgement. He also contributed greatly to the field of epistemology, which is also touched upon in this book, though it is largely focused on metaphysics.

I am trying to simplify and summarize very complex ideas, so if you are a professional philosopher, you likely don't need this review, but feel free to clarify if I got something wrong. But if you are a student or merely interested in ancient questions of metaphysics like I am, or if you simply want to sharpen your critical reasoning skills, then you will likely enjoy the work of Roderick Chisholm. If so, this is a great place to start.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many sections of this book are rich and profound, while others are painful to get through--owing to rampant definitions and meandering.

[Edmundo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work of philosophy. A beautiful structure of definitions that mutually solve some of the standard problems of philosophy, like identity over time, the Ship of Theseus, agent causation, knowledge sensu de re/de dicto, and more.