This is still circular logic. What makes one collection of cells and protoplasm a member of the human species? It is not merely the presence of a particular set of genes/chromosomes - there must be something else. — EricH

@Bob Ross

I want to "yes, and" Eric's comment. Even if you grant that a being is a member of the human species, that does not mean they count as a person or as a moral agent.

Everyday intuitions about moral agency are also limited by the status of a person. Children (especially) and young adults are treated with more lenience for behaving in a socially unacceptable manner and for committing moral wrongs, children's legal status is also different. People's status as an agent may change if they go into a permanent coma, we have next of kin rules, waivers, and even (arguably) the ability to extend our capacity for consent after our death with organ donation and wills. Moreover, unfertilised gametes and severed limbs are recognisably of the species homo sapiens and are not treated as moral persons - unless one is willing to admit that shagging, the normal functioning of fertilised ovums, menstruation and masturbation are each a peculiar brand of industrial slaughter.



To summarise, each of those entities counts as a member of the species homo sapiens, but they are not a moral agent. Some of them count as persons and have restricted or removed moral agency, some of them don't count as persons but nevertheless are treated as moral agents.

Straight lines on spheres? That's interesting too. — creativesoul

Yep! It turned out a property that uniquely characterised straight lines in our normal kind of space also applied to spheres, and it makes great circles. It's the taxicab circle thing again. Straight lines are only the things we expect in Euclidean ("flat") space. But that's an artificial restriction.

Edit: even flatness. The volume in the room you're in is flat.

This was cool. I would need to sit down with some algebra to understand it properly though. Regarding the projection - there will be a lot of degrees of freedom if you get to choose an arbitrary projection onto the plane, so I suppose picking a specific projection to the centre point in the plane and looking at its preimage under that projection is the idea you had in mind?

different systems that are equally good for x purpose, but then these systems will have similarities, mappings to one another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Like Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. Do the same thing differently.

I would quite like you to draw this. I don't think I am imagining it accurately.

*** If you think of the determining point as the vertex of a cone, there are an infinite number of cones, all sharing an axis, the circle is a section of. — Srap Tasmaner

I was imagining a cone, yeah. But now the variability makes sense given that there's an infinity of them. Am I right in thinking that the "correct" visualisation regarding picking the vertex is also equivalent to picking the gradient of the lines bounding the cone? Insofar as it constraints the circle in the plane's radius anyway.

It's been too long to do much more than mildly jog the memory. — Leontiskos

Fairy muff.

On my view you have reified abstract realities, making them, among other things delete-able. — Leontiskos

Deletion is shorthand for considering different sets - or using the set division operation. The sets I'm referring to were $\mathbb{R}^2$ and $\mathbb{R}^2/\{0\}$.

Are you not used to this sort of maths?

But under other projections, the "center" lands elsewhere, which for some reason seems really cool and even useful to me. — Srap Tasmaner

Can you show me one please?

My contention would be that there is no such thing as coplanar points without a plane, and that the cross-section of a hollow sphere is a collection of coplanar points. — Leontiskos

I suppose that means the great circle isn't a circle, since there's no coplanar points on it... Since there's no way to form a plane out of the points on a sphere's surface when you're only allowed to consider those.

But if indeed you can form a cross section, allowing yourself the exuberance of 3-space, then they are indeed coplanar and form a circle.

I suppose it's then an odd question why the same set of points can be considered a circle or not depending upon whether you consider them as part of a larger space.

Regardless though, there's no word for "coplanar" in Euclid's definition of a circle either. So we've needed to go beyond Euclid regardless. It would be odd if Euclid ever had need of the word, considering his is the geometry of the plane.

(Like points, apparently planes can also be "deleted.") — Leontiskos

Yes! The set {1,2,3} can have the element 3 deleted, giving the subset {1,2}. Is what I meant. The plane without the origin. This is a perfectly cromulent thing to do with sets.

I'm glad someone looked at the Russell article. — Banno

I had comments I really wanted to make about the original article but considering that a Proofs and Refutations style chat about square circles was right there it seemed a better opportunity to illustrate the intuitions behind lemma incorporation.

We could also define a circle as the cross-section of a sphere, but I was only saying that every (planar) cross-section of a sphere will in fact fulfill the definition I already set out. — Leontiskos

It would if you give yourself the liberty of hammering the cross section down onto a flat plane. Which is an exercise of the imagination, and not something set out in Euclid's axioms. Is the point. You end up having to mathematise all the stuff you do to make it work. The operative distinction is you're relying on a lot of extra-mathematical intuition and not putting in the work to make it precise. Which is mostly fine, it's just in such imprecision where lots of allegedly undesirable plurality can hide.

Do trust me that the counterexamples work verbatim though!

―― I don't know why I'm participating in this. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm gonna bugger off now too.

Does that point need also to be coplanar? Is there a counterexample I'm missing? — Srap Tasmaner

I was imagining putting the point away from the plane and bending the underlying surface we're trying to draw the circle on. I'm pretty sure we'd end up with some other shapes possible if we inclined the plane, never mind if we corrugated the fucker.

But I suppose that would also apply if we chose the coplanar point far away from the candidate point set... I wish I knew what circles were.

But don't you need to specify coplanar? If we're in 3d space, you've defined a sphere, in 4th I guess some sort of hypersphere, I don't know, blah blah blah. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah you're right. Circle, n-sphere, all the same thing in my head. Coplanarity works. A set of coplanar points equidistant from a point in their plane of coplanarity. Thanks!

We took our definition from Euclid, and the term there means a figure that lies entirely on a flat plane. — Leontiskos

Do you think the "great circle" (which you have yet to define) lies in three dimensional space rather than two dimensional space? That ambiguity is why I asked you to be more clear about what you were depicting in the first place. — Leontiskos

Fair enough. There's two things though:

Either you consider the sphere as embedded in 3-space, and the cross section plane isn't "flat" in some sense - it's at an incline. Or you consider the surface as a 2-dimensional object, in which case there's not even a plane to think about. Pick your poison. The latter is the original counter example and is much stronger, the former is easier to remedy.

If we define "distance" in the commonly accepted way, then there aren't. Are we disagreeing on something more profound than that? — Leontiskos

You're behaving like you know what these things are so well you've got them baked into your cerebellum. But clearly that's not true, as the definition you provided doesn't match something you clearly recognised as a circle! So yes, we could insist on your pretheoretical intuition, but it's no longer Euclid's... so I'm wondering what's wrong with it? How will you parry my counterexample?

I'm enjoying this discussion. — Banno

It is a lot like something from Proofs and Refutations.

I think it does. You've only asserted otherwise, you haven't shown it. — Leontiskos

Well I can tell you what I think a plane figure is.

A plane figure is closed curve which is inside a subset of $\mathbb{R}^2$. By that definition the great circle is not a plane figure, as it's not inside a subset of $\mathbb{R}^2$ - that circle instead would be a closed curve inside a subset of $\mathbb{R}^3$, or with extra precision the surface of the sphere.

What do you think a plane figure is?

Why are you doing this sort of thing? — Leontiskos

You do this sort of thing because stipulating a definition and then shit-testing it is standard mathematical practice.

I showed you the great circle on the surface of a sphere because I expected you would see it as a circle - it is - but it does not satisfy Euclid's definition of one verbatim, which you were clearly inspired by. And with maths words, verbatim is all anyone has. That's how you test the boundaries of your definitions and the consequences of ideas.

In picking out the great circle as a circle, you in fact sided with the example over the definition you stipulated. Which is the right thing to do, I think. You could also have ardently insisted that indeed, the great circle was not a great circle because it was not a plane figure. But you did not.

So now that you've abandoned Euclid's verbatim definition of a circle, you've got work to do in telling us what you mean by one.

As for me, I mean a set of points equidistant from a point. And by the by that also makes the great circle a circle. Score one for the thing which includes the taxicab circle over Euclid!

Exactly.

The cross-section of a sphere is a circle. — Leontiskos

Well who said anything about cross sections? I was talking about the sphere's surface. You chided me before about extraneous points and operations, and now you've given yourself the liberty of splitting a shape in two, taking an infinitely small cut of it, how exuberant. I just gave you a sphere's surface, not a cross section so...

You'll now need to tell me in what circumstances can you take a cross section of a volume and have it work to produce a circle. Let's assume that you can take any volume and any cross section and that will produce a circle...



Therefore those squares and rectangles are circles. Which is absurd. So your principle must have caveats. What are they, you've got some explaining to do!

Why do you think this? — Leontiskos

Read the definition:

A circle is a plane figure bounded by one curved line, and such that all straight lines drawn from a certain point within it to the bounding line, are equal. The bounding line is called its circumference and the point, its centre. — Circle | Wikipedia

A circle is a plane figure... so something which is not a plane figure cannot be a circle.

And what is "the great circle"? — Leontiskos

The great circle is the circle I've highlighted on the surface of the sphere. Since the circle is confined to the surface of the sphere, and the surface of the sphere is not a plane, it is not a plane figure.

I hope I'm not the only one who recognizes that you are more interested in this conversation than me. :grin: — Leontiskos

Aye.

A circle is a plane figure bounded by one curved line, and such that all straight lines drawn from a certain point within it to the bounding line, are equal. The bounding line is called its circumference and the point, its centre. — Circle | Wikipedia

Euclid says: not a circle. The great circle is not a plane figure.

And why is this? Is it not because of what those things actually are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think so, relative to tasks.

Sure. So with the "raindrop" addition example, isn't the appropriateness of the system determined by the real properties of rain drops? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes.

I am all on board with the idea that the tools will vary with the job, but it seems to me that to explain why some tools are better for some jobs than others requires including properties of "things in the world." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah that's a hard one. I don't know if there's a hard and fast answer for systems generically! This seems to be a root level epistemological issue - what it means for a description to be adequate.

Even when we speak of "concepts," it seems to me that there is plenty of evidence to support the claim that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by natural selection, and this in turn means our thinking and our preferences, relate to "how the world is." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed. Though there are lots of ways what we create can model, describe or explain stuff. Maybe even mirroring different aspects of stuff. Maybe it doesn't need to do any of these things to still be important.

But they are. You have an odd assumption that points are stipulative, as if we could delete a point or as if a point could have spatial extension. The set of points is still equidistant from a point. This idea of "deleting" points mixes up reality with imagination. — Leontiskos

Let's change track. You tell me exactly what you mean by a circle with an intensional definition, and we'll go with that. Then do the same for roundness and pointy!

But is our preference for systems arbitrary? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think it is.

But we don't pick systems arbitrarily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. They are picked to reflect, capture or illustrate certain ideas. If you came up with a system of arithmetic that couldn't prove 1+1=2, it'd be a shitty system of arithmetic.

It's not the case that the Earth, baseballs, and basketballs are all just as triangular as they are spherical just because it is possible to define a system where this is so.

I agree. The everyday conceptual content of Earth (the concept), baseballs (the concept) and basketballs (the concept) are that they are round.

To affirm that would be to default on the idea that any statement about the world having priority over any.

I disagree. I think you missed the case that priority can also be seen as purpose and context relative. Here's a series of examples regarding roundness and sphericality.

I prioritise the notion of roundness when considering the Earth on an everyday basis, and I might while calculating its surface area - fuckit it's a sphere and that'll do. But on a day to day basis, my body treats the Earth by and large as flat. And that has priority over a merely intellectual commitment to its roundness as far as my feet are concerned. If I'm trying to stand on a bosu ball, now that fucker is round.

If I were studying variations in the acceleration due to gravity on the Earth's surface, I couldn't treat the Earth as a sphere - since it's roughly oblate, it's a spheroid. And crap like Mt Everest sticks out of it, so it's pointy. If we go by @Leontiskos intuition that round things cannot be pointy in any context, well the Earth is in trouble.

More generically, the role specifying a system has might be thought of as setting out some concept for some purpose. That allows you to see whether the system specification is fit for task.

How do you decide whether it's fit for task? Well I suppose you decide on a task by task basis. Thinking of Earth strictly as a sphere, with the assumption that a sphere is like a circle where every point on its surface is equidistant from its centre... That doesn't work as soon as your legs move. So that's not fit for walking.

But it is fit for a quick and dirty calculation of volume. Or an explanation for how it attained its shape due to gravity.

Here are more abstract examples.

Those tasks are quite concrete - there are harder ones. Like how might we consider fitness for task of a concept of logic in the context of arguing with a salesperson? Their responses aren't going to follow propositional logic... So something informal is required, they're definitely trying to persuade you. Emotional appeals? Reframing? Motivational speech? We could speak of a "logic of sales" that consists of such chicanery. And it would be nuts to think of the salesperson's behaviour solely terms of syllogisms and propositions.

How might we consider the laws of addition when considered from the perspective of raindrops? Well one raindrop alongside another raindrop might be two raindrops, but it could be one larger raindrop depending upon the distance between them. So "raindrop addition" might be way more complicated than adding discrete units of things...

Here's what I think is the general principle.

The rough trick is the same in each case, you have some conceptual content you want to specify, you try to set out a collection of rules that specify the conceptual content, then you shit test the rules to see if you got anything wrong. Or you can maybe prove all and only the results that you want - or solve all your problems - then you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.

"An interesting question arrises". There are two values for the limit - 2 and √2. So the space is not smooth, unless we re-define "smooth". — Banno

We had a related discussion here.

My explanation for the weirdness of the staircase paradox. The tl;dr of it is that the length you get by placing a measuring tape along a curve doesn't respect the process of infinitely refining shapes. So it's nothing to do with the shape, it's to do with the concepts of length and limit.

I honestly don't have the maths to try to think about volume and rate concepts in taxicab geometry. Other than my intuition that they're the same as the Euclidean ones... even though the length is different.

Importantly, doing this would not be wrong, as such. It's just one approach amongst many. — Banno

Indeed.

Mathematics papers absolutely call taxicab-circles circles. I just wouldn't call them circles to my students learning shapes.

A circle is, by definition, a set of points Euclidean equidistant from one central point. — fdrake

@Leontiskos

As an aside, here are some possible counterexamples.

Take all the points Euclidean distance 1 from the point (0,0) in the Euclidean plane. Then delete the point (0,0) from the plane. Is that set still a circle? Looks like it, but they're no longer equidistant from a point in the space. Since the point they were equidistant from has been deleted.

Another one. Take the circle with radius 5 centred at the point (0,0). Then remove all points in the space which have coordinates which are both natural numbers - like (1,2), (7,8). Removing all those points removes the point (3,4), which lays upon that circle (since 3^2+4^2=5^2). That doesn't do anything to change the smoothness of the circle either, since every point on it is the same as before. So it's still smooth, no corners, all points equidistance... It's just missing a point. So, all points in that space which are Euclidean distance 5 from the origin are in the set - so is it a circle?

These would mean you have to come up with some constraint on how hole filled the space, or the circle, could be, and think about holiness itself in order to restore the fact both are clearly circles... Or maybe they're not circle at all at this point. Or neither of them are real counterexamples - it could be my specification's shite.

See what I mean?

Well, your post would appear obtuse to the layman, and maybe it just is. — Leontiskos

It is obtuse, but I don't think it just is.

A metric is a way of assigning distances to pairs of points. When you consider a space, it has a metric. The usual distance people think of is called the Euclidean distance, and it's the one you're thinking of and measure with a ruler on a piece of paper.

The thing is that the choice of metric is just that, a choice, and you can write down various other spaces with various other metrics. One of those other metrics is called the taxicab metric. Contrasting that to the Euclidean metric:

Imagine you start at a point, and you go 1 step north and 1 step northeast
The taxicab metric says you've travelled 2 total units - you add the steps.
The euclidean metric says you've travelled sqrt(2) total units - you measure the line.

Because a metric defines the concept of an interpoint distance, circles in taxicab geometry are different from circles in euclidean geometry. A circle in taxicab geometry, a set of points defined as equidistant from a single point, looks a lot like a square in euclidean space. 4 corners, 4 right angles, 4 equal sides.

So it is a circle, if a circle is defined by the property of being equidistant from a point. But perhaps it is not a circle, because... well, like you, you could insist that we're not talking about a circle when we're talking about sets equidistant from a point in the taxicab metric. So for you, you'd have to do something to block what we're talking about as a circle in taxicab geometry being a "real" circle.

That places a burden on you to study the concepts of circularity and square-iness, and to say why the first blocks the latter and vice versa. Which is what I did in the post. I'll go through it for nonmathematicians.

For something to count as a square, it needs to have:

S 1) Four sides of equal length.
S 2) Each side meets exactly two other sides at right angles.

Let's just take that as a given, that is what a square is. Now we need to think about a circle. What's a circle?

C 1 ) A circle is a set of points equidistant from one point.

If ( C 1 ) is the only defining property, the taxicab circle is indeed a circle, it's just a circle in taxicab space. Clearly you don't want it to be a circle, so you need to stipulate a restriction. I could also insist that it is a circle, and how are we to decide between your preference and my preference? Anyway, onwards:

What is round is not pointy — Leontiskos

You specified such a restriction with "what is round is not pointy", which is something similar to what I formalised with the idea of smoothness. The "corners" form the "pointy bits" of the square because the function that defines a square is not smooth at the exact corner point.

There is an ambiguity regarding pointiness, which is similar to the above ambiguity regarding equidistance. In thinking about the corners of the square thing (the taxicab circle) in taxicab space as pointy in the above sense, that requires specifying the roundness concept in terms of the measure of size - smoothness is typically characterised with respect to a measure of size.

Something is differentiable when its derivative exists at every point.
The derivative of a curve exists at a point if and only if at that point the limit of the ratio of the function evaluated at the endpoints of an arbitrarily small interval divided by the length of that interval exists (IE it becomes just a number).
A curve is smooth if you can apply the procedure above to it arbitrarily many times.

The concepts of "interval" and "length" there are also doing a lot of work, since they're distance and size flavoured. And should we expect them to work as our prior Euclidean flavour intuitions would in taxicab geometry? What gives us the right to insist that we think of smoothness as we would in a Euclidean space and transfer it onto smoothness in a taxicab space?

Clearly you would want to insist that they do, my intuitions also run that way. But my intuitions can also side with circles not necessarily being smooth since I'm used to dealing with this stuff!

Where we can agree, though, is with lemma incorporation. In which we specify a set of properties that say exactly what counts as a circle (in your sense) and why it can't be a square.

So for you:

A circle is, by definition, a set of points Euclidean equidistant from one central point.

And thus we've revealed what sneaky hidden presumption you had through lemma incorporation. What we haven't done is decided why that must be accepted as the definition of a circle.

If you want to join in with this exercise of lemma incorporation, I invite you to stipulate a definition of pointy! And we will see where it goes.

Here's a Proofs and Refutations - the source of Lakatos' concept of lemma incorporation - inspired investigation into square circles.

It's the corners that screw you up in trying to come up with such a square circle object, I think. For something to be a corner, two lines must meet at a right angle. Two lines meeting at a right angle doesn't produce a differentiable function (along the shape the lines meet in) regardless of how you rotate the shape or embed it in another one's surface, so you've got to choose between jagged edge to allow corners, and roundness.

You use the above, and the taxicab thing in my previous post (quoted below), to stipulate the following:

The properties that define circles make shapes that appear as squares in taxicab space. But the geometry jettisons our concept of roundness, unfortunately. — fdrake

I could guess the principle: every circle with corners is not round. Specifying

1) A circle is shape resulting from constant distance around a point.
2) A corner is a meeting of two lines at a right angle.
3) A round shape is smooth along its curve.

And hope to prove that there's no such shape. But I could've misspecified the underlying concepts. I imagine there's something odd about "corner" and "smooth", because "corner" relies upon "right angle", and "right angle" depends upon "angle", which depends upon the concept of an inner product, and the privileged connection between inner product and metric is something we get from usual Euclidean space. Moreover, "smooth" could also be generalised to reference a different metric.

So perhaps there is some space that has a metric related to an inner product in which there are round circles with corners, but I've not thought of such a counterexample myself.

Me going through the maths there isn't an attempt to side with over @Banno, because being able to explore the conceptual content of the allegedly logically impossible should tell you that logical impossibility isn't all it's cracked up to be. You do have to ask "which logic and system?", and "what concept am I not formalising right?" or "what concept is making the weird shit I'm imagining weird?".

What would we get if we just assumed a perfectly round square circle with four corners? — Banno

The properties that define circles make shapes that appear as squares in taxicab space. But the geometry jettisons our concept of roundness, unfortunately.

Thought it might have been him. — Srap Tasmaner

We even had a long discussion about it 7 years ago.

1. They could. I forget who this was -- LW? Sellars? I don't know -- but someone pointed out that you could write

cat
mat

for "The cat is on the mat". — Srap Tasmaner

That's Sellars. Naturalism and Ontology I think.

Oversimplified, of course, but I'm trying not to dive back in! — J

Wise.

and see what the book helps us to understand about the perennial problem of mind's special place in the world, or what Kimhi calls "the uniqueness of thinking." — J

This is just spitballing: I didn't see much new in it? A deformation of Kant? New schema of thought and content? Concretising the schematism into expression rather than making it transcendentally prior? The only touchstones I saw for his central theme of unity were Kant and Parmenides. I have no idea about the connection between that unity and oneness.

Troll summary in a nutshell: Is the like like the like that likens the unlike with the like in the like and the unlike alike?

Thinking and Being is almost impossible for me to put down and pick up while remembering what it was talking about. That's made me give up trying to make an exegesis of it, or even trying to come to an understanding of it I would believe accurate.

There are a few things I want to take away from my limited time reading the book (half of it over 3 sessions). The first is the syncategorematic/categormatic distinction. Syncategorematic expressions cannot be part of predicative judgements, categormatic expressions can be. An example of the former would be "Sally thinks ...", with an unevaluated placeholder. An example of the latter is "The cat sat upon the mat". The distinction there isn't between intensional and extensional understandings of expressions, either, it's to do with whether a given concept can be considerable as part of a predicative judgement tout court.

The idea of part of a judgement in the book is also non-truth functional. If someone thinks that P, the assertoric force associated with thinking that P is conceived of as part of thinking that P - and the force is not truth functional. In effect, one's thinking itself takes the form "thinking ("judgement-stroke ( that P )")", rather than "thinking ("that P")". I have used the quotes to denote something like "entity boundaries" (scarequotes, my term) in the state of consciousness that composes a judgement, and brackets to disambiguate parts which would correspond to propositions/declarative sentences.

Something particularly important for Kimhi is unity without dualities. To a first approximation, this is a unity of the propositional form in the judgement with the state of being which produces the judgement. It would thus be, respectively

A) neither psychological nor logical - in virtue of that unity being a composite of judgements of what is and of the mental juxtaposition of what is judged to be.
B) neither normative nor descriptive - in virtue of that unity consisting of a series of judgements of what is that may be true or false and thus not normative. Then, there are regularities of those judgements which enable them to express what is true or false in mental and practical ways. The latter in turn compels people to learn to judge in that manner, so that their expressions may be true or false.
C) neither mental nor abstract - in virtue of that the judgements are patterns of thought and enabling norms of chains of association, they are pragmatised patterns of thought.

In terms of the thread title, Kimhi definitely provides 'a challenge to Frege on assertion", but I think the thrust of the book is more properly thought of as providing a challenge to everything in the heritage of linguistic philosophy after Frege. And the nature of that challenge is to limit the relevance of extensional understandings of terms in judgements, undermine the distinction between psychologicism and logicism as responding to false problems, and try to bring the mental - in the sense of understanding the structure of concepts - back into the analysis of logical form.

So I'm going to imagine that Kimhi invites his readers to imagine what a post-Frege linguistically oriented philosophy can look like if it centred the understanding of concepts that coordinate expressions and situated expressions alongside the states which produce them.

I'm not convinced that Kimhi's approach to challenge that philosophical heritage succeeds or even produces anything particularly fecund for further explication on his terms, but I do think it raises interesting problems and (what seem to me to be) neglected associations.

I just don't know wtf to do with it honestly. After reading it I'm left wondering how I could use it to help me think about others' thoughts and expressions, and I see dubious relevance of it to my life. Other than reminding me that concepts matter, which is something I tend to believe anyway.

By the same token, a person is bodily. Here "is" does not indicate identity, but rather serves to relate a predicate to the subject, as in "Socrates is a man." — SophistiCat

I agree. The predicate "is bodily", maybe even "involves this person's body" or "is embodied" generically apply to anything the person does. But seemingly not to all things they are involved in. Compare signing a contract to being bound by it. The former is an act done with the body, the latter commits the person to specified acts in specified conditions. The former is bodily because signing is, the latter is not bodily it is institutional or social or normative.

We perhaps could even say that signing a contract does not commit a body to any specific action, just a specific type of action. You can write your signature in a variety of slightly different ways, all that matters is that you have done an act which counts as signing in the appropriate way. Even if it's the body's hand that moves, it's the person that the contract binds upon the dotted line.

In that regard, the person partakes in actions which are not individuated by their bodily movements, they are individuated by the broader context of the body and the world we're in. The body must also, therefore, be able to incorporate, act upon and modify this context and its world (in a circumscribed fashion).

If I should wish to include legal personhood, institutional roles and other social functions as part of personhood, I believe it would be necessary to say that each person is not "just" their body. But perhaps that their body has several privileged roles in determining who and how they are. It has the job of functioning in accordance with roles in other registers - social rather than ambulatory, normative rather than sensory - by coordinating itself to count as according with them.

Which is to say, a body generates its personhood but is not coextensive with it.

A similar survey of the supposed vast ranks of continental philosophers? — Banno

This isn't very fair. The distinction between the "two strands" was done for historical and political, rather than content related reasons. It was also made internally to the demographic of the analytic camp. At this point it's little more than cultural posturing for a culture that no longer exists. You find Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Gadamer, Boudrillard, Lyotard... - all the names you could ever want to namedrop - all over the humanities, in sociology, nursing, pedagogy... anything human.

No, to have something doesn't necessarily imply that the something is separate from yourself - hence why we say things like "my body" - or, for that matter, "my mind." Yes, you are a whole person, with a body, and its various parts, and a mind, and its various aspects. — SophistiCat

Also @Kurt Keefner. I'm just riffing with both of you, I don't think I really disagree with either of you, your posts were thought provoking so I wanted to share the thoughts I had.

I think that when we use phrases like "my body", it's mostly indexical, and doesn't ned to have much metaphysical import. A reference mechanism to this body, the one which is typing this post, is what "my body" is, regardless of how I otherwise conceive it.

But the phrase does enable unfortunate predications. You might want to say that you move your body, or that you have control over your body, and that kind of phrasing engenders a distinct term - a you - which somehow nevertheless has something like motor control over your body, even though motor control is some kind of part of your body, and thus not distinct from you, control and autonomy, and your body.

I am conscious and bodily to be sure, but I am not a mind or a body, and I don't have a body. — Kurt Keefner

I think this is very true. There are plenty of ways that every person is which are not just bodily or minded, even though the body and mind are involved. Anything the body does is somehow more than the body, but the body is not just a substantive part of the act - the body is not a "substance" of walking.

The person may also be identified with a role they play, irrespective of their body's nature - a barista, a lawyer, a cook. It is the person which is those things, and not the body.

I'm closing the thread since it's pseudoscience. This isn't to say you can't criticise Einstein or relativity, as @Wayfarer's reference to the Bergson/Einstein debate shows, just don't do it like this, alright?

To, the next time a poet or Hollywood foolosopher, throws a library at you, respond with a burp, a fart, or a nonchalant smile, all the while while holding your hands over your ears and shouting LALALALALA (or the chant of your preference--we're flexible on that here). — Baden

I was wondering if this was a reference to the earlier work of Roland Fartes? The casual cancellation of repression, the ecstatic joy of dodging a library, seems a reference to their most famous performance - unum cuminbum, but no longer in the for the court of kings.

There isn't anything more we can do to help you at this point @Carlo Roosen, try your best.

Since nothing yet really exists it's a bit more work than normal. — Benkei

I can imagine. I have no idea how you'd even do it in principle for complicated models.