Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Abstract

What philosophers have lately come to accept as analysis of the concept of a person is not actually analysis of that concept at all. Strawson, whose usage represents the current standard, identifies the concept of a person as “the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics...are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type.”1 But there are many entities besides persons that have both mental and physical properties. As it happens—though it seems extraordinary that this should be so—there is no common English word for the type of entity Strawson has in mind, a type that includes not only human beings but animals of various lesser species as well. Still, this hardly justifies the misappropriation of a valuable philosophical term.