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Persons: A History
What is a person? Why do we count certain beings as persons and others not? How is the concept of a person distinct from the concept of a human being, or from the concept of the self? When and why did the concept of a person come into existence? What is the relationship between moral personhood and metaphysical personhood? How has their relationship changed over the last two millennia?
This volume presents a genealogy of the concept of a person. It demonstrates how personhood--like the other central concepts of philosophy, law, and everyday life--has gained its significance not through definition but through the accretion of layers of meaning over centuries. We can only fully understand the concept by knowing its history. Essays show further how the concept of a person has five main strands: persons are particulars, roles, entities with special moral significance, rational beings, and selves. Thus, to count someone or something as a person is simultaneously to describe it--as a particular, a role, a rational being, and a self--and to prescribe certain norms concerning how it may act and how others may act towards it. A group of distinguished thinkers and philosophers here untangle these and other insights about personhood, asking us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions of the self.
This volume presents a genealogy of the concept of a person. It demonstrates how personhood--like the other central concepts of philosophy, law, and everyday life--has gained its significance not through definition but through the accretion of layers of meaning over centuries. We can only fully understand the concept by knowing its history. Essays show further how the concept of a person has five main strands: persons are particulars, roles, entities with special moral significance, rational beings, and selves. Thus, to count someone or something as a person is simultaneously to describe it--as a particular, a role, a rational being, and a self--and to prescribe certain norms concerning how it may act and how others may act towards it. A group of distinguished thinkers and philosophers here untangle these and other insights about personhood, asking us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions of the self.
416 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 28, 2021
I have mixed feelings about this book. In some places (particularly in the earlier sections) it's impenetrably confusing. Like, maybe it's a failure of my comprehension, but I couldn't make anything out of this kind of passage:
"Nonetheless, the (extramental) divine substance is (identical to or consists of?) the collection of hypostases. This collectivist account of the divine ousia supports Severus' theological view that "one of the Trinity became incarnate" and that God the Son is not the whole divine substance but part of it. If God the Son were the whole divine substance, then the Father and the Holy Spirit would have become incarnate too. Still, Severus is aware that this account of universals seems paradoxical. The concept of the divine substance is predicated wholly of each hypostasis, but the divine substance itself is (identical to or consists of?) all the divine hypostases." (chapter 2, p. 64)
I get that the Medieval theology the authors are trying to incorporate inherently resists easy explanation, but perhaps that's an indicator that it's not that valuable to study.
In other places, however, the book was piercing and insightful. This passage from the introduction (actually one of the best chapters) is a good example:
"To count someone or something as a person is simultaneously to describe it—as a particular, a role, a rational being, a self—and to prescribe certain norms concerning how it may act and how it may be treated by other persons. Typically, these norms are thought to apply because of the being's descriptive features. […] The concept of a person thus fuses the normative and descriptive. This is one of the reasons why we need a concept of a person, one of the ways it is different from, and richer than, the concept of a human being." (p. 3)
If you want to read this book, I would suggest skipping the first 160 pages after the introduction, and prioritising reading only the following chapters: Persons in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy, The Concept of Persons in Kant and Fichte, Personhood in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Philosophy, Persons and Selves in Buddhist Philosophy and Persons and Moral Status (the last being the most important). The chapters on the Minotaur and Ghost in the Shell are fun but not, I think, particularly insightful.
"Nonetheless, the (extramental) divine substance is (identical to or consists of?) the collection of hypostases. This collectivist account of the divine ousia supports Severus' theological view that "one of the Trinity became incarnate" and that God the Son is not the whole divine substance but part of it. If God the Son were the whole divine substance, then the Father and the Holy Spirit would have become incarnate too. Still, Severus is aware that this account of universals seems paradoxical. The concept of the divine substance is predicated wholly of each hypostasis, but the divine substance itself is (identical to or consists of?) all the divine hypostases." (chapter 2, p. 64)
I get that the Medieval theology the authors are trying to incorporate inherently resists easy explanation, but perhaps that's an indicator that it's not that valuable to study.
In other places, however, the book was piercing and insightful. This passage from the introduction (actually one of the best chapters) is a good example:
"To count someone or something as a person is simultaneously to describe it—as a particular, a role, a rational being, a self—and to prescribe certain norms concerning how it may act and how it may be treated by other persons. Typically, these norms are thought to apply because of the being's descriptive features. […] The concept of a person thus fuses the normative and descriptive. This is one of the reasons why we need a concept of a person, one of the ways it is different from, and richer than, the concept of a human being." (p. 3)
If you want to read this book, I would suggest skipping the first 160 pages after the introduction, and prioritising reading only the following chapters: Persons in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy, The Concept of Persons in Kant and Fichte, Personhood in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Philosophy, Persons and Selves in Buddhist Philosophy and Persons and Moral Status (the last being the most important). The chapters on the Minotaur and Ghost in the Shell are fun but not, I think, particularly insightful.
May 27, 2026
Frankly, I don’t understand this book. Unless your research is highly specialized, your ability to understand what each of the scholars is saying will be limited. In particular, the section on the patristics and on the Islamic philosophies is impenetrably dense. They take no time to contextualize anything or define their terms. Unless you already have a solid foundation in their ideas and language, you will not get anything out of those chapters.
It’s just a frustrating reading experience that probably isn’t too useful to people already familiar with the philosophies discussed here and it certainly isn’t accessible for those who are not. Just a dreadful read.
It’s just a frustrating reading experience that probably isn’t too useful to people already familiar with the philosophies discussed here and it certainly isn’t accessible for those who are not. Just a dreadful read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews