Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Strawson's discussion of the concept of a person does seem to allow for the possibility of there being immaterial persons. Nevertheless his insistence that the concept of a person is 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 suggests that he is conflating the concept of a human being, in the technical sense of homo sapiens, and the concept of a person.
1 Strawson, P. F., Individuals (London, 1959), 87–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Flew, A., ‘Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity’, Philosophy 26 (1951), 53–68 and especially section 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd edition (London, 1694)Google Scholar, Book 2, chapter 27, sections 7 and 11.