In our brief survey of body and mind we have not examined the materialist view according to which mental entities do not exist. Being convinced that an adequate ontology must be able to distinguish persons from mere bodies, we have supposed that the difference lies in a mental being having nonphysical properties which a mere body by its very nature cannot have.

Secondly, we have not examined either the idealist view according to which material, concrete or physical entities do not exist. We have supposed that there are 'material' bodies and that there are people who have bodies of this kind. The existential postulates of both (exclusive) materialism and (exclusive) idealism are just too farfetched to leave us with any useful notion of existence. In not taking the objections of this materialism and this idealism seriously, we follow the ordinary way of speaking about physical and mental properties, or about concrete and abstract things, because we have no reason to deviate from that usage in this respect.

We have investigated the position of those who hold body and mind to be two existing things, and two separate things. We have in line with this view identified the concept of person with that of mind or soul, and also with that of the whole or combination of body and mind or soul. In both cases this position turned out to be untenable.

Instead of proceeding along one of these three traditional ways, we have chosen and prepared a fourth way by founding our concept of personhood on the attributivist interpretation of set structures, in particular those structures which are whole/part configurations with one part only. It is on this view that bodies and persons both exist as entities, albeit not as separate entities since each body of the type concerned is part of a person or mental being. And it is on this view that minds (in the sense of nonpredicative things) do not exist, whereas mental properties and relations do.