ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 submits another physicalist thesis to philosophical analysis—but one that deserves its own focused attention. This is a thesis called the “Constitution View” and is largely advanced by metaphysician Lynne Rudder Baker. Her view purports to account for the physical nature of human beings, deny substance dualism, and account for the identity of human persons by positing that human persons are constituted by human bodies rather than being identical with them. This is a metaphysics that circulates very widely in the literature and it is a metaphysics that the author argues has three insuperable problems: (1) her definition of constitution lacks any explanatory power for reasons explained herein. (2) Even if Baker can make a plausible definition of constitution, constitution seems to offer an account of too many persons or no human persons at all. (3) Constitution yields no essential distinction between human and divine persons. For these three reasons, either singularly or cumulatively, the author finds that the view fails to account for humans and their eschatological bodily resurrections.
