In the Introduction to this book, I announced my intention of presenting a unitary concept of human being in place of the concept that makes human being a composite of body and mind. The preceding chapters have been devoted to the working out of the constitutive elements of such a concept, and the time has now come to put them all together in a synoptic view of the “the entity each of us is.” This may suggest that the business of this chapter is just the assembly of prefabricated parts to form a concept that no longer has any problematic features, but that is not the case. In some ways, the most difficult questions raised by the line of thought I have been developing have still to be resolved. Some of these can, in fact, be dealt with only when the stage of synthesis has been reached, as it now has.

One such question concerns the relation in which the ontological conception of human being developed here stands to physicalism. question arises because of apparent similarities between the one and the other. I have, for example, committed myself to the thesis that we are our bodies, and physicalism enunciates an ostensibly identical view. What is common to these two positions is a disposition to dispense with the concept of mind, but this common feature has to be understood in a wider context of fundamental differences concerning the way the situation that results from dropping the concept of mind is to be understood.