NDPR Andrew Brenner Personal Ontology: Mystery and its Consequences

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.10.8 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Andrew Brenner, Personal Ontology: Mystery and its Consequences, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 250pp., $110.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781009367073.

Reviewed by Brian Cutter, University of Notre Dame

The central question of personal ontology is “What am I?” Of course, this question has many true answers (“a philosopher”, “an earthling”, “a person”, “an adult”), most of which are philosophically uninteresting. The candidate answers of interest to personal ontologists are answers like: I’m an immaterial soul, or a composite of body and soul, or a wholly physical animal, or a body (something that is currently living but which will later exist as a corpse), or a large temporal part of an animal (say, something that begins to exist when the human animal develops certain mental capacities and ceases to...