Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Personhood — what a person is and what makes one persist — personal identity over time, psychological continuity and what matters in survival, persons as bearers of reasons, rights and responsibility. Not the self, which is self (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
41 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-130 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics | Dufner (2025), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/. A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-166); worth reading as the current, compact reference map from theories of persistence to applied ethics; it is a survey that takes no side, so it is a route to the primary sources (Parfit 1984, Olson 1997, McMahan 2002, Schechtman 1996, Korsgaard 1989) rather than a source of claims. |
| LIT-136 v2 | The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi (2011), DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6. Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-130); worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines. |
| LIT-292 v2 | Identification and Identity | Velleman (2002), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/2143.003.0007. Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-268); worth reading as the sharpest critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) identification of autonomy with a volitional essence, and as a careful source for what Frankfurt said in the essays collected in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999). It is not a survey of the 1971–1987 hierarchical account, which it summarizes in one paragraph and defers to “What Happens When Someone Acts?”; its positive view is stated “briefly” and explicitly deferred to other essays. |
| LIT-405 | Where Am I? | Dennett (1978), the closing essay of Brainstorms. A narrator’s brain (“Yorick”) is kept in a vat in Houston and radio-linked to his body (“Hamlet”) under Tulsa. Where is he? Not simply where the body is, and not simply where the brain is: he cannot think “here” of the vat. He favours being wherever his point of view is, finds that unclear, and when the links fail finds himself “in Houston”. A computer duplicate (“Hubert”) runs in step with Yorick, and either can drive a new body with no detectable switch. The essay ends when the two drift out of step and a second person speaks through the body. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-338), in a retyped course copy, not the printed book; worth reading as the founding thought experiment on where a person is when brain and body are apart, and the place the record’s threads on extended vehicles, scattered individuals and functional duplicates meet. It is fiction with a philosophical argument inside it. It tries three answers to “where am I?” (where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is), favours the third, admits it is unclear, and ends by showing that two synchronised brains can drift into two persons. It argues by intuition pump and settles nothing; the narrator calls one of its answers a truth “of underwhelming significance”. |
| LIT-413 v2 | The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul | Hofstadter & Dennett (eds.) (1981), Basic Books. An anthology of 27 selections, fiction and philosophy, on self, soul and consciousness, each followed by a “Reflections” by the editors. Among them are Turing’s imitation-game paper (LIT-394), Searle’s Chinese room (LIT-400), Nagel’s bat (LIT-096), Dennett’s “Where Am I?” and Hofstadter’s “Prelude … Ant Fugue” from GEB (LIT-437). Unread: registered from the catalogue record and a contents note; the Reflections, which are the editors’ own contribution, were not seen. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the Library of Congress catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1981 Basic Books, Harvester, Bantam and Penguin printings are all lending-only, HathiTrust has no record for the LCCN, and no publisher, editor or Tufts-archive copy is posted. The editors’ Reflections are unread. Two of the selections were read in full from lawful copies of their first publications and filed on their own: Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400). |
| LIT-446 | Survival and Identity | Lewis (1976), DOI-10.1525/9780520353060-002. What matters in survival is mental continuity and connectedness (the R-relation among person-stages), and it is also identity, because the two answers relate different things. Persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the I-relation (being stages of one person) is the R-relation in every possible case. Fission and fusion are two persons sharing stages, counted as one by “tensed identity”; Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping 137-year persons; degrees of personal identity come from supervaluating over cut-offs for R. Against Perry: two persons, not three, took part in a fission. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-373), from a scan of the 1976 printing posted on Andrew M. Bailey’s “Papers by David Lewis” page, OCR’d here; worth reading as the four-dimensionalist reconciliation of Parfit with common sense, and the source of stage-sharing and counting by tensed identity. It agrees with Parfit that what matters is mental continuity and connectedness, the R-relation among person-stages, and denies that this conflicts with identity: persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission becomes two persons sharing their early stages, and degrees are handled by supervaluation. A reconciliation by redefinition of counting, which Lewis grants is “somewhat counterintuitive”. |
| LIT-447 | Personal Identity | Parfit (1971), DOI-10.2307/2184309. Against two beliefs, that every question about personal identity must have an answer and that important questions turn on it. In Wiggins’s division case, each half-brain recipient stands in the relation that would be survival if there were only one, so “how could a double success be a failure?”. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity is one-one and all-or-nothing. Q-memory and q-intention show the relations need not presuppose identity. Speaking of past and future selves by degree of connectedness, the principle of self-interest has no independent force. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-378), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Athens course page; worth reading as the paper that separated what matters in survival from identity, and the short original of Part III of Reasons and Persons. Its division case makes “I survive as neither” absurd and “I survive as both” incompatible with identity, so it concludes that what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity cannot. It supplies q-memory, the non-branching criterion, and the vocabulary of successive selves. Its first conclusion is argued; its claim that connectedness matters more than continuity is left, in its own words, needing “more arguments than I have space to give”. |
| LIT-448 v2 | The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology | Olson (1997), Oxford University Press. The book-length case for animalism. Per its abstract, “our identity over time involves no psychological facts”: psychological accounts “lead to grave metaphysical problems”, the arguments for them are inconclusive, and since we are animals we have “the purely biological identity conditions of animals”. Its chapters run from psychology and personal identity through persistence, the case against the psychological approach, whether I was ever a fetus and whether people are animals, to the biological approach and alternatives. Unread: registered from the abstract and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is subscription-only, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-449 v2 | What we talk to when we talk to language models | Chalmers (2026), Inquiry, DOI 10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727582; circulated earlier as PhilArchive preprint CHAWWT-8. Unread. By its abstract it asks who or what our interlocutor is when we talk to an LLM: how to characterise it in terms of mental states; what kind of system it is in the philosophy of computation (“a model, an instance, a thread, or a persona?”); what personal identity comes to for such interlocutors; and what follows for AI welfare and moral status. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from Crossref, OpenAlex (which carries the abstract of the published version) and the author’s papers page, not read: tandfonline.com, philpapers.org and philarchive.org returned 403 to every article and PDF URL, the Internet Archive was offline, and no other repository copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-454 | Personal Identity | Olson (2002, rev. 2023), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Separates seven questions (characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology, what matters) and then takes up persistence. Three answers: psychological continuity (the majority view, repaired from Locke’s memory criterion via causal dependence), brute-physical continuity (animalism), and anticriterialism. Fission forces the psychological view into multiple occupancy or a non-branching clause, which makes identity not what matters. The too-many-thinkers objection says that if we are not our animals there are two thinkers in every chair. Temporal-parts ontology may leave it indeterminate what we are. Avoids the word “self”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-374); worth reading as the standard map of the analytic personal-identity debate, written by the leading animalist. It separates seven questions that are usually run together, then works the persistence question through psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers, fission and the too-many-thinkers objection. It is a survey with a side: §§6–7 put the case for animalism more fully than the case against it, and the entry sets the word “self” aside, so the narrative and minimal selves are outside it. |
| LIT-462 | The Self and the Future | Williams (1970), DOI-10.2307/2183946. One experiment, told twice. A and B enter a machine that exchanges their memories and characters, and choose selfishly which emerging person gets $100,000 and which torture: the outcomes make “changing bodies” the natural description. Told as a series of things that will happen to me (amnesia, changed character, another’s “memories”, then torture), fear stays rational at every step, and the step that completes the swap changes only what happens to someone else. Undecidability and convention make the clash worse, not better. If forced to choose selfishly, pass the pain to the other body, and call it a “risk”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-387), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Vermont course page; worth reading as the strongest case that first-person concern tracks the body, and the paper that made the reduplication-free body swap a problem for the psychological view. It tells one body-exchange experiment twice. Told third-personally, with choices before and reactions after, it says A and B swap bodies. Told first-personally, as a series of things that will happen to me before I am tortured, it says I am the one tortured. It argues that neither indeterminacy nor convention can resolve the clash, and ends with a “rather shaky” preference for the bodily answer, as a “risk”. An argument from what fear is rational, not a theory. |
| LIT-464 | Of Identity and Diversity | Locke (1694), Essay II.xxvii, added in the second edition. Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: the same mass is the same particles, the same oak or horse or man is the same continued life, and the same person is the same consciousness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being” that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought”. It is independent of substance, material or immaterial: the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is the same person but not the same man. “Person” is “a forensic term”, grounding reward and punishment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-385), in the Wikisource transcription of the 1853 Troutman & Hayes reprint of the sixth-edition text, compared word by word with Project Gutenberg’s; worth reading as the founding text of the psychological account of personal identity and the source of the record’s whole line on what a person is. It separates the same substance, the same man and the same person, puts the person in “consciousness” extended back to past actions, and calls “person” a “forensic term”. Its cases, the prince and the cobbler, the day-man and the night-man, the severed little finger, are argued from intuition, and its key relation, “the same consciousness”, is never defined. |
| LIT-465 | Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | Shanahan (2024), Inquiry 69(6):2982–3010, from arXiv:2402.12422. After Wittgenstein, consciousness words mean only what is public, so the question for an exotic entity is whether we could “engineer an encounter” with it in a shared world and what a society-wide conversation would then say. Disembodied chat agents are not even candidates; virtually embodied LLM agents could be. Tool use and memory make belief talk increasingly literal, but a chat agent has no “self worth preserving”, and a role player has no “person behind the mask”: its identity is a shifting distribution of roles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-382) in the arXiv v2 preprint (July 2024), not the Inquiry version of record, which returned 403; worth reading as the Wittgensteinian alternative to the evidential debate about AI consciousness. It replaces “is it conscious?” with “could we engineer an encounter with it, and how would our language adapt?”, and so counts disembodied chat agents as not even candidates. On the self it is brief and pointed: a chat agent has “nothing that would qualify as a self worth preserving”, lacking body, personal history and autobiographical memory, and a role-playing agent has no “person behind the mask”; its identity, “insofar as that notion even made sense”, is the shifting distribution of roles. It argues by method and scenario, not evidence, and says so. |
| LIT-468 v2 | The Constitution of Selves | Schechtman (1996), Cornell University Press. Separates the reidentification question (is this the same person?) from the characterization question (which actions, experiences and traits are this person’s own?), and argues against analytic philosophy’s attention to the first at the expense of the second. Chapters 1–3 take up reidentification; chapters 4–6 give the narrative self-constitution view, on which, as Strawson quotes it, a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative”. The source of the term “characterization question” in the SEP map. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Cornell/De Gruyter eBook is sold, not open, and the Internet Archive copy is for print-disabled users only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-564 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1992), Tanner Lectures at Clare Hall, Cambridge. The “normative question” asks what justifies morality’s claims on us. Voluntarism, realism and reflective endorsement each fail alone. The answer is autonomy: because human consciousness is reflective, we need reasons, and so need a “conception of your practical identity” that makes us “a law to yourself”. Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing our humanity, and reasons are public, so others can obligate us. “Autonomy is the source of obligation.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-465), as the read substitute for the book The Sources of Normativity (1996, LIT-599), which is its “longer version” with commentaries and a reply. Worth reading as Korsgaard’s own first statement of practical identity and of the claim that “autonomy is the source of obligation”. The reflective structure of human consciousness means we must act for reasons and so must have “a conception of your practical identity”, “a description under which you value yourself”; reasons express that identity and obligations “spring from what that identity forbids”. Valuing any practical identity commits one to valuing one’s humanity, and the publicity of reasons commits one to others. The lectures concede that the argument is “sketchy, and sketchily argued”. |
| LIT-567 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman (2018), essay 11 of Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (OUP). A planning agent’s self-governance over time is self-governance at each time along a planned activity, plus cross-temporal links of intention that parallel the interlocking intentions of shared agency: in diachronic self-governance one acts “together” with oneself. Standpoints are “diachronicalized” by a conditional, reflexive end of one’s own diachronic self-governance. That end can make willpower and resistance to “shuffling” self-governed, while anticipated regret at “plan’s end” excludes drinking Kavka’s toxin. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-464), in the author’s pre-publication draft of 10 July 2017, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (2018) and, through its summary of the planning theory, for Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987, LIT-593). A planning agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock like the intentions of people acting together, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints are “diachronicalized”: they include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance. That end explains how willpower and resisting “shuffling” between incomparable options can be self-governed, and anticipated regret at plan’s end rules out drinking Kavka’s toxin. A philosophical model argued by cases; nothing in it is tested. |
| LIT-575 v2 | Identification and Wholeheartedness | Frankfurt (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 27–45; reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 159–176. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is Frankfurt’s answer to the regress in the hierarchical account: identification ends in a “decisive commitment” made “without reservation”, which is not arbitrary, and wholeheartedness is the integration that such a decision aims at, extruding the rival desire “as an outlaw”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter records and the record’s own second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core in both the Schoeman volume and the 1988 collection, Unpaywall lists no open copy, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to academia.edu and lecture notes about the essay, not the essay. A human reader with library access to either volume (pp. 27–45 of the first, pp. 159–176 of the second) can read it in an hour; that reading would move this to Active and is the first-hand text THEORY-029 needs for its middle case. |
| LIT-587 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard (2014), in Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP), pp. 190–214. Two conceptions of agency are set side by side: natural (action is movement caused by the right mental state) and normatively constituted (action is movement backed by a unified agent, whose unity is achieved by following norms). Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. Choosing maxims under that form constitutes one’s practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes sets the task of unification. Unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, so people can literally act together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-455), in the author’s posted manuscript, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Self-Constitution (2009, LIT-597), which it summarises and extends, and as Korsgaard’s direct engagement with Bratman. Agency is “normatively constituted”: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and that unity is achieved by following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, which give action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. The content of the maxims we choose under that form constitutes our “practical identities”. So “we make ourselves into agents”, and unity of agency, individual or collective, “is an achievement, not a given”. Argued, not proved; the account of reason as unification is said to be “lifted” from her other work. |
| LIT-590 v2 | Structures of Agency: Essays | Bratman (2007), Oxford University Press: twelve essays (1996–2006) on how planning structures human agency over time and ground self-governance. They include “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency” (on the Lockean role of plans), “Two Problems about Human Agency”, “Autonomy and Hierarchy”, “Three Theories of Self-Governance” and “Temptation Revisited”. Unread: registered from the contents; the theory is read in Bratman’s 2018 essay LIT-567. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its thirteen chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed, and the Internet Archive scan (structuresofagen0000brat) is an access-restricted lending copy, not opened. No chapter was found as a lawful open article. Its theory of self-governance is read first-hand in Bratman’s later essay “A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time” (2018, LIT-567), which builds on its essays. Filed because it is the collection in which the planning theory of self-governance and its Lockean reading appear, and other filings in this batch cite it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-595 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams (2019), Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 3(1):1–18. Narrative identity is “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, giving a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. Storytelling evolved with human hypersociality. The self develops from social actor (by age 2) to motivated agent (school years) to autobiographical author (adolescence). Agentic and redemptive stories go with well-being and generativity, and cultures supply master narratives. “Biology guides and culture fills in the details.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-470), as the read substitute for McAdams & McLean, “Narrative Identity” (2013; LIT-572), which has no lawful copy and whose definition this essay takes over word for word. Worth reading as McAdams’s own short statement of narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It places the life story as the third layer of a self that develops from actor to agent to author, and reports that story features (agency, redemption, coherence) predict well-being and generativity. A review essay: the empirical claims are cited, not shown, and the evolutionary story is offered as plausible, not tested. |
| LIT-596 v2 | Three Theories of Self-Governance | Bratman (2004), Philosophical Topics 32(1/2):21–46; reprinted in Structures of Agency (OUP 2007), pp. 222–253. Unread. Per the publisher’s abstract it revisits the Frankfurt–Watson exchange over the structures of free agency, treats it as a debate about self-governance, holds that agential authority comes from an attitude’s role in the “Lockean organization” of temporally extended agency rather than from tracking the good, gives that role to self-governing policies, and proposes an intention-based theory. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref and Oxford Academic records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the article is paywalled at the Philosophy Documentation Center (purchase, $20) and the reprint at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and PhilPapers and ResearchGate refused automated requests (403). A human reader with access to Philosophical Topics 32 or to Structures of Agency (pp. 222–253) can read it; that reading would move this to Active and would supply THEORY-029 with Bratman’s self-governing policies first-hand. |
| LIT-597 v2 | Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity | Korsgaard (2009), Oxford University Press, from her 2002 Locke Lectures. The argument is that we constitute ourselves as agents, and as the particular agents we are, by choosing under the constitutive principles of action, the categorical and hypothetical imperatives. On Plato’s “constitutional model”, good action is action that issues from a unified soul. The chapters run from agency and identity to “How to be a Person”. Unread: registered from the contents; the account is read in LIT-587. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its ten chapters, not read: no lawful copy of the book could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed and the Internet Archive scan (selfconstitution0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Korsgaard’s drafts of the 2002 Locke Lectures it grew from are no longer on her Harvard site, but survive in the Internet Archive’s captures of her old FAS page (people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/Korsgaard.LL1–LL6, 2002–2005). They are author-posted and lawful, but book-length and superseded, and were not read. Its account is read first-hand in her short restatement “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (2014, LIT-587, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for self-constitution. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or the drafts are read, not on merit. |
| LIT-599 v2 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1996), Cambridge University Press, ed. Onora O’Neill: the expanded Tanner Lectures (1992), with commentaries by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams and Korsgaard’s reply. The four lectures follow the 1992 sequence: the normative question, reflective endorsement, the authority of reflection, and the origin of value and the scope of obligation. Unread: registered from the contents; the argument is read in the lectures, LIT-564. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core is closed, the author’s Harvard deposit (DASH) answered with an AWS WAF human-verification page that was not passed, and the Internet Archive scan (sourcesofnormati0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Its argument is read first-hand in the Tanner Lectures it expands (1992, LIT-564, read in full), which it extends. Filed because it is the canonical citation for practical identity, and because what it adds (the commentaries and Korsgaard’s reply) is what the lectures lack. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-602 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling (1980), The Public Interest, Summer 1980, pp. 94-118. People behave sometimes “as if they had two selves” in “continual contest for control”, and the tactics of self-management (removing the option, bright lines, monitoring, delays, raising the stakes) are the tactics of managing someone else. A single-dimension model of impatience fits poorly. Which self is authentic is left open. Failures of consumer self-management may be worth “on the order of a trillion dollars”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-452), in place of the 1984 Ely Lecture (LIT-573), which has no lawful free copy. Worth reading as Schelling’s own first statement of “egonomics”: a person sometimes behaves “as if they had two selves” that alternate in command, and the tactics people use on themselves (mittens, alarm clocks across the room, bright lines, Christmas savings, deadlines, delays) are the tactics they use to manage another person. It refuses to say which self is authentic in general, and it gives an order-of-magnitude estimate that failures of consumer self-management cost as much as all other consumer-ignorance problems together. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-693 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays | Frankfurt (1988), Cambridge University Press: thirteen essays from 1969 to 1988, twelve reprinted “with minor stylistic changes” and “Rationality and the Unthinkable” new. Not read as a book. Its preface, read in the publisher’s preview, says the essays’ considerations are “primarily structural rather than historical”, that volition rather than reason is the faculty they explore, and that necessity is “in certain respects essential” to autonomy. The record cites its pagination as IWWCA. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 as a seed, from Crossref and from Cambridge’s publisher preview of the book (front matter, contents, sources, the three-page preface and reprint pp. 1–9 of chapter 1), not read as a book. The book is sold at Cambridge Core and Unpaywall lists no open copy. Its essays are filed one by one where they matter: chapters 1 and 2 (LIT-694, LIT-692) were read in full from their journal versions, and chapters 7 and 12 (LIT-686, LIT-575) are Deferred. The seed is kept because the record cites the book’s pagination (“IWWCA”) throughout and because its preface states Frankfurt’s method first-hand. A person with library access can supply the remaining essays; chapters 5, 8 and 12 are the ones the record’s theories lean on. |
| LIT-727 | The Corporation as a Moral Person | French (1979), American Philosophical Quarterly 16(3):207–215. A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability, which requires intentional agency. A corporation’s Internal Decision (CID) Structure, its organizational chart plus recognition rules in corporate policy, licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts done for corporate reasons. So corporations, unlike mobs, can be full-fledged moral persons. That agency suffices for moral personhood is asserted, not argued here. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-568): in full, from a scanned JSTOR copy in a Brooklyn College instructor’s readings folder. Worth reading as the founding statement of the claim that corporations are moral persons. French rests it on the Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure: an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy. It licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate intentional acts. Limits: he asserts, and says he cannot here argue, that intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, and the paper offers no test of corporate intentionality beyond the redescription itself. |
| LIT-1269 | Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical study | Nichols & Bruno (2010), Philosophical Psychology 23:293–312. Survey studies of University of Arizona introductory philosophy students on Williams’s (1970) personal-identity cases. A replication of Blok et al.’s brain-transplant vignette finds the person judged “still Jim” when memories survive and not when they are erased, in first- and third-person versions alike. A stripped-down version of Williams’s Pain case (a brain infection treated by a procedure that eliminates “distinctive mental states”) gets 68% (N = 50) saying “you will feel the pain” of later injections, and 72% (N = 54) in the third person, with no difference between the two. An open-ended abstract question draws psychological answers from over 70% (N = 53), and over 80% (N = 54) deny that a future person with none of their memories could be them. Given both and told they conflict, 64% (N = 45, p = 0.053) side with memory. The authors read the psychological intuitions as the more robust, and so as support for a psychological criterion “insofar as” intuitions should guide the theory. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-996) in full, from the published PDF linked from the first author’s own publications page; worth reading as the first survey test of Williams’s two tellings of the body-exchange case and of his two explanations of why they diverge. Undergraduates mostly say a brain-transplant patient whose memories are erased is no longer the same person, and mostly say that a patient whose distinctive mental states are wiped will still feel the pain of later injections; neither result moves with first- against third-person telling. Asked abstractly, about 70% name psychological factors and more than 80% deny that someone without any of their memories could be them; made to choose, 64% side with memory (p = 0.053). Read it as evidence about how a concept of personal persistence responds to framing in one student population, not about what persistence is: the authors make the bearing conditional on intuitions informing the theory, test only necessity of psychology, and leave unseparated whether the Pain vignette asks about identity or about bare sentience. |
| LIT-1288 | The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | Boyle (2024). Legal and moral personhood are different lines, and personhood is pressed on two tracks: empathy-driven moral recognition, and legal personality granted for convenience, as with corporations. Run across AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and chimeras, the book argues that ChatGPT broke the link between fluent language and mind, that corporate rights grew without reasoned decision, and that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint. Boyle predicts an intermediate legal status for AI. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1014) in full; worth reading as the clearest statement of the two routes to personhood, empathy-driven moral recognition and efficiency-driven legal personality, with the corporation as the working example of the second; for the legal history of how US corporations took Fourteenth Amendment rights without reasoned decision; for the analysis of the Tommy habeas suits; and for the five meanings of “too close to human” in chimera debates. Read it knowing that it is an essay that declines to give a theory, that its AI timing rests on others’ forecasts, that its case against Searle is a burden-of-proof presumption, and that its own view (species membership as of right plus capacity) is argued in a few pages. |
| LIT-1308 | Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno | Berniūnas & Dranseika (2016), Philosophical Psychology 29:96–122, from the abstract only. A reply to Nichols & Bruno (2010). The authors argue that in transformation cases the folk do not use one concept of personal identity but separate concepts of “person”, “identity” and “individual”, so that identity can be ascribed to a post-transformation individual no longer categorized as a person. They report new survey evidence that the folk do not treat psychological continuity as necessary either for being categorized as a person or for identity over time, reading identity judgements off the use of proper names, as Nichols & Bruno did. They doubt current designs can tell qualitative from numerical identity judgements, and conclude for scepticism about folk intuitions in theorizing about personal identity. Samples, vignettes and effect sizes are not known here. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21 from the abstract only; no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-21, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Where the reader looked: OpenAlex and Unpaywall (both “closed”, no repository copy); Semantic Scholar (openAccessPdf “CLOSED”); Europe PMC (no record); tandfonline.com (403 to this client, and paywalled); PhilPapers and PhilArchive (record BERFCO, 403 to this client, so whether PhilArchive holds an archived copy is unsettled); PhilPeople profiles of both authors (403); the second author’s personal site, www.dranseika.lt, linked from his Jagiellonian University (INCET) staff page (the publications page lists the paper with no link to a copy); the INCET staff page itself (no copy); the Lituanistika database record (content/101037: abstract and keywords, no file); web and Google Scholar searches for a PDF, a preprint or an accepted manuscript in the Vilnius University repository (none found; Scholar returned no version of the paper itself). ResearchGate was not relied on. A failure of access for PhilArchive, which should be rechecked from a client it does not refuse, and of availability elsewhere. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1702 | Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice | Hershfield (2011). A review, mostly of the author’s own studies, of “future self-continuity”: following Parfit, people who feel their future self is less connected to them treat it more like a stranger and save less for it. Three components are proposed. Similarity, measured by choosing overlapping circles (adapted from Aron et al.’s inclusion-of-other-in-self scale) for one’s self in ten years, predicted patient choices and accumulated assets, controlling for age; neural activity for the future self that looked more like activity for another person predicted steeper discounting (r = .47). Vividness: seeing an age-progressed image of oneself raised hypothetical retirement saving. Positivity: respect for the elderly tracked national saving rates and, when induced, raised patient choices. Asking directly how much people liked and cared for their future selves did not predict choice, though those answers were near ceiling. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1259) from the NIH author manuscript (PMC3764505), served by NCBI’s PMC OAI-PMH service after Europe PMC refused this client; worth reading as the short statement of the future self-continuity programme, and as the record’s clearest case of a measured extent of the self predicting concern-like behaviour where directly reported caring did not. Read it knowing that the review gives almost no statistics, that the caring null comes from a ceiling, and that the circles are framed as similarity. |
| LIT-1740 | The Misfortunes of the Dead | Pitcher (1984). Distinguishes the ante-mortem person, who lived, from the post-mortem person, who is dead, and argues that the dead can be wronged and harmed: an event after death, such as slander or a broken promise, makes it true that the ante-mortem person was harmed, without backward causation. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; the 1984 article is closed at JSTOR and the 1993 reprint at De Gruyter. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Luper’s SEP entry on death (LIT-1792). |
| LIT-1754 | Death and the Afterlife | Scheffler (2013), his 2012 Tanner Lectures with replies. The afterlife conjecture: much of what we value depends on our confidence that humanity will go on after our deaths (a “collective afterlife”), as the doomsday and infertility scenarios show, so we care about people who will live after us, whom we will never know. He also argues that personal immortality would drain value of its point. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Open Library lists the book for print-disabled readers only. Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures, the book’s first two chapters, are open at tannerlectures.org. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Scheffler’s 2012 Tanner Lectures (LIT-1779) and Cottingham’s NDPR review (LIT-1784). |
| LIT-1759 | Surviving Death | Johnston (2010). Argues that personal identity is response-dependent (“Protean”), so the self-interest that seems to require survival is not fixed; the good person, who identifies with the interests of humanity at large, survives death in the onward life of others. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. The Internet Archive’s copy (survivingdeath0000john) is for print-disabled readers only and is not lent, and no open edition was found. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Johnston 2023 (LIT-1788), in which Johnston withdraws the book’s account of survival. |
| LIT-1768 | Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles | Parfit (2017), his last paper, submitted unfinished the day before his death. Most of our choices of policy change who will exist, so a policy that makes later lives much worse may be worse for no one who ever lives: the non-identity problem. Narrow person-affecting principles, on which nothing can be worse, or wrong, if it is worse for no one, then imply that such policies, and even ending human history by all choosing childlessness, are not wrong. Parfit rejects them, and rejects solutions that appeal to rights, wronging or Boonin’s acceptance of the implausible conclusions. He also retracts his own earlier appeal to an impersonal principle. Instead, being caused to exist with a life worth living is an intrinsic, existential benefit, and on a Wide Person-Affecting Principle one outcome is worse if it benefits people less. That solves the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms and keeps “better than” transitive, where the Weak Narrow Principle and the Two-Tier View do not. For different numbers he proposes a Wide Dual Principle, counting both the benefits to each and the benefits to all. It does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion, though Parfit grants that this alone does not let us avoid it. He allows that we may be permitted, or required, to favour present people over greater benefits to future people, but warns that done by every generation this could “wreck the Earth”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1263) from the publisher’s PDF as reprinted in The Philosophers’ Annual vol. 37 (philosophersannual.org); worth reading as Parfit’s final answer to his own non-identity problem, which puts obligations to future people on a person-affecting footing without making them owed to anyone in particular. |
| LIT-1788 | Surviving Death, Again | Johnston (2023). Records “a change in view” from Surviving Death (2010). There he argued that the Christian hope of resurrection fails and offered a this-worldly surrogate, “living on in the onward rush of humankind”, built on the idea that we are higher-order things whose deepest future-directed attitudes fix which future embodiments are ours. Now, because reductionist accounts of personal identity breed “fellow travelers” (personites and the like) with moral status and conflicting interests, he holds that we are essentially embodied wills whose present bodies are not essential, so re-embodiment after death is possible. Defines subserving, implementing and interdependence as non-reductive relations between mental and neural events. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1257) from the published version, open under CC BY-NC-ND at TheoLogica; worth reading as Johnston’s own retraction of the account of survival in Surviving Death (LIT-1759, Unavailable), read in its place. It now holds that we are essentially embodied wills, which drops the self-making view on which the earlier “onward rush of humankind” rested. The paper’s own subject is the metaphysics of survival, not altruism. |
| LIT-1792 | Death | The SEP survey of the philosophy of death, revised in 2026. Luper gives a compositional account of life (an object is alive when its parts control what composes it, under information they carry) and defines death as the loss of the capacity for vital activities. He reconstructs Epicurus’s argument that death is nothing to us. He shows that it fails if welfare is not only pleasure or if things can harm by precluding goods: the deprivationist defense. He surveys answers to when death harms (concurrentism, priorism, subsequentism, indefinitism, atemporalism), Lucretius’s symmetry argument, and posthumous harm, where Pitcher’s desire-based account locates the harm in the living person. He sides with Williams’s critics: immortality need not be tedious. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1294), in place of LIT-1740, which could not be reached; worth reading as a map of the death-harm debate with its premises made explicit. It gives Pitcher’s account of posthumous harm in a paragraph, without his ante-mortem person. |
| LIT-1874 | Corporate Agency and Possible Futures | Mulgan (2018), Journal of Business Ethics 154(4). Unread; from the abstract only. It asks for an account of corporate agency that is “temporally robust”, helping future people in broken or digital futures to resist domination by corporate groups with no regard for human beings, and argues that the only such account is “moralised extreme collectivism”: full moral personhood for those corporate groups, and only those, that are reliably disposed to respond appropriately to moral reasons. Expected to report Velasquez’s denial of corporate agency, which the record holds unread. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. The publisher’s open-access copy (CC BY 4.0) is at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. On 2026-10-30 that address, and the article page link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1, answered HTTP 200 with a 3 kB “Client Challenge” page that needs JavaScript, not the PDF, on two tries. The St Andrews repository copy that OpenAlex lists (hdl.handle.net/10023/13302, resolving to research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/13302) timed out twice with no bytes received, and a Wayback capture of the Springer PDF was refused (connection reset). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1.pdf. |
| LIT-1941 | M-Autonomy | Metzinger (2015). M-autonomy is the capacity for second-order mental action, whose central element is veto: rules imposed on one’s own mental behaviour, goal selection and permanence, rational guidance, and the intentional inhibition, suspension or ending of an ongoing process. It comes in three degrees: represented knowledge that one has the ability, executed attentional control, and cognitive control. During mind-wandering the ability is kept and its representation in the self-model, the “epistemic agent model”, is lost, and an ability is exercised only when so represented. The return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it, a “functionally adequate form of self-deception”. The quantitative argument and the two-thirds figure repeat the 2013 paper’s. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1497), from the author’s copy on his Mainz university pages (blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/Metzinger_M-Autonomy_JCS_2015.pdf, linked from thomasmetzinger.com), typeset with the journal’s running heads and pagination, text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading for the sharpest statement of the will-organization question in Metzinger: what mind-wandering loses is “not the ability itself” but the conscious knowledge of it, and “one can only deliberately and autonomously exert an ability if that ability is explicitly represented in one’s phenomenal self-model” (THEORY-1300). It also argues that the return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it (THEORY-1298). A development of LIT-1942 with the empirical detail cut; no new data. |