Animalism and Person as a Basic Sort

In this paper Animalism is analysed. It will be argued that Animalism is correct in claiming (i) that being of a certain sort of animal S is a fundamental individuative substance sortal concept (animal of the species Homo Sapiens), (ii) that this implies that Animalism is correct in claiming that persons such as us are, by necessity, human beings, (iii) that remaining the same animal is a necessary condition for our identity over time. Contrary to Animalism it will be argued that this does not imply that person should be understood as a phased sortal concept. It will be argued that Animalism rests upon a prior conception of person, and that this implies that person must be understood as a basic substance sortal concept through which we have to individuate ourselves and others. It is further argued that this, together with the insights of Animalism, implies that persons, by necessity, are beings of a biological nature.

Persons : their identity and individuation

This study is about the nature of persons and personal identity. It belongs to a tradition that maintains that in order to understand what it is to be a person we must clarify what personal identity consists in. In this pursuit, I differentiate between the problems (i) How do persons persist? and (ii) What facts, if any, does personal identity consist in? Concerning the first question, I argue that persons persist three-dimensionally (the endurance view), and not four-dimensionally (the perdurarne view), on the ground that objects must always fall under some substance sortal concept S (the sortal dependency of individuation), and that the concept person entails that objects falling under it are three-dimensional. Concerning the second question, I differentiate between Criterianists, who maintain that it is possible to specify a non-circular and informative criterion for personal identity, and Non-Criterianists, who deny that such a specification is possible. I argue against Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they are either (i) circular, (ii) violate the intrinsicality of identity or (iii) do not adequately represent what we are essentially. I further criticise three Psychological Non-Criterianist accounts of personal identity on the ground that they wrongly assume that 'person' refers to mental entities. Instead I formulate the Revised Animal Attribute View where person is understood as a basic sortal concept which picks out a biological sort of enduring animals. In this, I claim that the real essence of a person is determined by the real essence of the kind of animal he is, without thereby denying that persons have a real essence as persons.

From concept to embodiment : challenge and strategy

Facing with the difficulty in information propagation and synthesizing from conceptual to embodiment design, this paper introduces a function-oriented, axiom based conceptual modeling scheme. Default logic reasoning is exploited for recognition and reconstitution of conceptual product geometric and topological information. The proposed product modeling system and reasoning approach testify a methodology of "structural variation design", which is verified in the implementation of a GPAL (Green Product All Life-cycle) CAD system. The GPAL system includes major enhancement modules of a mechanism layout sketching method based on fuzzy logic, a knowledge-based function-to-form mapping mechanism and conceptual form reconstitution paradigm based on default geometric reasoning. A mechanical hand design example shows a more than 20 times increase in design efficacy with these enhancement modules in the GPAL system on a general 3D CAD platform.