might disagree on whether anything has the latter kind.^14 But the dominant view is
that we do not.^15
There are also strands of the no-self doctrine in Western philosophy. Hume (1958:
251 – 3) notoriously raised skeptical doubts about a real self. In the tradition of British
Idealism, the question of whether persons or selves are in some way less than fully
real marked a real divide. Personalists accepted the fundamentality of persons.
Prominent examples include Calkins (1927) and McTaggart (1927a, 1927b).^16 On
the other side of the divide were Bosanquet et al. (1917–18) and Bradley (1930);
Bosanquet (1917–18) treated persons (and otherfinite entities) as something like
attributes of the universe as a whole, while Bradley (1914: 448) endorsed an ontology
with degrees of being.^17
These are important counter-perspectives to the one defended here.
6.3 Being as a Fundamental Mode
As noted in section 5.5, I grant the soundness of theCogitoargument: one can infer
from the claim that one thinks to the claim that one is, i.e., has being. But it would be
a mistake to then immediately infer that one is fully real. One can infer that one exists
but not how one exists from the mere claim that one is thinking. This point is
intimately related to Kant’s criticism of rational psychology: one is not entitled to
infer that one exists as anunconditionedsubstance from the mere claim that one is
thinking. In general, the conclusions deliverable by theCogitoare limited. TheCogito
cannot by itself teach us that we are substances, or that we are simple, or even that we
persist over time. To think otherwise would be to succumb to what Kant calls
paralogisms of pure reason.^18
There are many genuine modes of being. But we needn’t determine which among
them persons enjoy to determine whether persons are fully real if being itself is a
fundamental mode of being. For then theCogitoin conjunction with this claim
would quickly deliver one’s own fundamentality. And each person could run the
same argument for herself. My question would be answered, and this chapter would
befinished.
(^14) Siderits (2007: 53–5) notes that in early Buddhist philosophies there is a kind of ontological bias
against composite objects:“wholes are not really real, only their parts are.”(Note the peculiar phrase“really
real,”which was the subject of much discussion in sections 5.4 and 5.5.) Siderits (2007: 69) also
distinguishes between things that do and do not exist in a strict sense. See also Siderits (2007: 111 15 – 13).
One school of Buddhism, the Puggalavadins, did affirm the full reality of human persons. See
Laumakis (2008: 137 16 – 8) for a brief discussion.
17 See McDaniel (forthcoming-c and 2009d) for overviews of their respective philosophies.
18 See Mander (2011: 384) for further discussion of Bosanquet.
See Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason, specifically the subsection of the transcendental dialectic titled
“The Paralogisms of Pure Reason.”This begins at A341/B399 (Kant 1999a: 411).