Princípios (Jun 2008)
A “pessoa” de Rudder Baker é realmente incorporada?
Abstract
Some philosophers materialists think, against the dualism of substance, that an embodied mind is only a mind that depends on a body to exist, that is, that the mind doesn’t exist independently of a body. I will take as representative of this very limited point of view about embodiment the ideas of Lynne Baker and her Constitution View. Baker says that she prefers to face the problem of the relationship between persons and bodies than the problem of the relationship between mind and body because this last formulation of the problem implies the idea of a mind distinct and separated of the body while the first is more according of her view of an embodied and situated mind. But the problem is that Baker forgets it when she defines persons in terms of first-person perspective or self-consciousness. Although, Baker says that the self-consciousness depends on structural – a body – and environmental – the situation – conditions, what becomes a self-conscious human person an entity ontologically distinct of the body that constitutes it and of other animals are their realizations like arts, philosophy, science, moral, etc. It looks like that for Baker the self-consciousness is not only a necessary condition but also a sufficient one for that human realizations, while the body fulfill only an indirect role. Against these ideas we can ask: the great realizations that distinguish the human persons of other animals would be possible independently of the biological constitution of our body and its needs?
