The Christian Vanguard

Baker’s constitution view states that personal identity depends on mental property of the First Person Perspective. This is the ability to conceive oneself as oneself, or as a referent to the first person pronoun. This is not to say it is a being with a point of view, as mere animals do, but mere animals cannot conceive of themselves as the subject of such thoughts. Having a point of view is necessary but not alone sufficient for being a person. Having a FPP is sufficient for being a person. Further, human persons are constituted by human bodies. Now constitution is a relation between different primary kinds, which entails that they are not identical. A statue may be constituted by copper, but the statue is not identical to the statue because they have different persistence conditions. For example, a bronze statue may be flattened to make copper wire, and though the copper persists, the statue does not. On the other side of the coin, a statue may be made of marble or cheese, and the ...

One thing I learned in my existentialism class last semester was the importance of being intersubjective. This means being with an other in a way that is real and sincere and not fake and shallow (read The Underground Man by Dostoevsky or The Stranger by Albert Camus on how not to be intersubjective). I argued that self-sacrifice is one of the most intersubjective ways one can be. As Jesus said, there is no greater love than that. But if being intersubjective is what is key to the existentialist, then refusing to be intersubjective is wrong, existentially. So, we come to a contradiction: self-sacrifice is a way to be intersubjective and not be intersubjective. A way to reconcile this is by including an after-life. Clearly, some acts of self-sacrifice are not wrong. To do something out of mere duty is, for a secular existentialist anyways, a grave sin. So, if there is life after death, you can give one's life for another that is still worthy of being a proper existential act. If ...