ABSTRACT
Our aim in this chapter is to determine if Reductionists can adequately answer the many criticisms that stem from their Impersonal Description (ID) thesis, the claim that we can give a complete description of reality without either asserting or presupposing that persons exist. But there is another aim as well. Some of the objections that we shall consider do not involve commitment to any particular alternative view about the nature of persons. Other objections, though, are based on what was earlier (in Chapter 1) called the dual aspect view, a kind of NonReductionism that agrees with Reductionism in rejecting the self, yet still maintains that the concept of the person is unanalysable and in some sense primitive. If the arguments of the previous chapter are correct, then there are good reasons to reject the claim that the existence of the person involves the existence of a self. Proponents of the dual aspect view claim that we still have good reason to take persons as existing over and above psychophysical elements. As we examine objections that are based on this view, we shall seek to give it the careful scrutiny it deserves. But as we saw in Chapter 1, Buddhist Reductionists are mereological nihilists, and their response to the dual aspect view depends in part on the claim that nothing partite could be ultimately real. The full defence of that claim will only come in Chapter 4.
