ABSTRACT
This work concerns Reductionism and its consequences. A Reductionist (that is, a reductionist about persons) holds that the existence of a person is really nothing more than just the existence of certain other kinds of things.1 In this respect it is not unlike saying that a pool of water really just is a mass of H2O molecules, or that a bolt of lightning really just is a series of electrical discharges. Reductionism about persons is thus a type of ontological reductionism: it holds that a certain sort of thing that is ordinarily thought to exist turns out to be reducible to certain other sorts of things that are in some sense ontologically more basic. Before investigating the consequences of Reductionism, it is important to be clear about just what it might mean to say that something is reducible to other kinds of things. Reductionists typically say that a thing of kind K just is a set of ‘im-Kish’ things when assembled in a certain way. The ‘is’ of just is suggests identity, but the ‘just’ suggests that the K lacks the ontological robustness required for identity. So there is something of a mystery here. In this chapter we will first investigate a Buddhist framework that may shed some light on ontological reductionisms in general; then we will look at how this applies to the case of persons.
