ABSTRACT
This final chapter revolves around Sydney Shoemaker’s ‘brain transplantation’ story and Wiggins’s responses to this peculiar narrative. The chapter starts with a survey of his shifting attitudes towards it, and describes how, despite numerous concerns, his assessment of the story remains ambiguous. It will be shown why the narrative resists his analysis. It is contended that it is underpinned by a mechanistic logic, and that it thus shifts one’s metaphysical focus from organisms – natural substances that are prior to their parts – onto biological artefacts. In concluding, the implications for Wiggins’s Human Being Theory are discussed, and the critique offered in Chapter 5 is reiterated and reinforced.
