what is the human person essay

The Human Person: Nature, Ethical and Theological Viewpoints

Philosophical meaning of Person . The Person as a living concrete reality: its origin and constitutive elements. Logical, ethical and social consequences. Theological implications .

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The concept of Person needs to be clearly established by philosophical considerations that go farther than the merely measurable parameters of the physical sciences. We use the term in everyday life and we seem to be clear about its meaning, even if we do not define it explicitly: a person is not a thing in the wide sense that includes mostly inanimate objects, but a living reality, thus implying a source of activity that is self-originated and that shows a spontaneity not found in the physical laws by themselves.

But this is just the first step. Nobody thinks of microbes, insects, fish or even other larger and marvelous living things as persons. While there is a common tendency to describe some animals –mostly in mythological or poetic terms- as fictional characters speaking and acting as we do, we do not take this seriously, except –perhaps- when regarding house pets or primates as basically so similar to ourselves that we uncritically attribute to them our own vices and virtues.

In our experience and common language we encounter persons, and describe them as such, only when we consider human beings. Something new is present in the way Man acts that is the common root of self-appreciation, culture (both in the sciences, the humanities, the different religions) and of the structure of society at all levels. This basic and universal root we call human rationality and thus we define Man as a Rational Animal .

A Person is thus defined by an activity in which ends are freely sought after being known as concepts (containing information that goes past the data of the senses), and valued as good. Rationality is expressed and realized in the search for Truth, Beauty and Goodness, a multiple activity that corresponds to the two powers of the human spirit: intelligence and free will, to know and to love. Knowledge in this case is not a mere reaction to an external stimulus (this is the first source of our acquaintance with the world, through sense impressions), but a process where the data are consciously analyzed to obtain ideas of universal value, and inferences or deductions that apply to them well beyond the direct experience.The person is conscious of multiple possibilities, both of representing reality and of acting, and looks for the best explanation of facts and for the consequences of various courses of action, either as ends in themselves or as means to other ends. This leads to value judgments that embody purpose and free choice . Thus we apply to the person’s activity the categories of truth-error and of suitability and “goodness” that presuppose ends and means in acordance with the nature of things.

The philosophical concept of nature expresses the essence of a given reality in so far as it is the sufficient reason for its activities: acting should be tied to what the agent is. This is applied in science when we define matter –at any level- precisely by its form of interacting with other matter, including our laboratory instruments. An unnatural behavior has the connotation of error, it is something wrong and inappropriate, that is never found in the simple processes of the inanimate world, but that can be due -in the case of a person- to a free decision. In such a case we speak of right and wrong, the basis or moral judgments and of the concepts of rights and duties both at the personal level and also in the context of society.

Only Man, in our known Universe, has the power to know and choose in this way. While animals exhibit wonderful behavior, their acting cannot be attributed to a free choice arising from the conscious and free selection of alternative paths. A genetic program, coupled with conditioned responses from experience, rules animal activity. Consequently, no animal is bound by “duties” nor can it be the subject of corresponding rights, but we can be bound by duties towards animals even those that are not considered property of another human person.

Summing up : t he human animal is “Person” because human activity includes new concerns , due to intellectual powers and free will. By itself, intelligence is not a new way of acting but of knowing, and it is this new knowledge that should direct the free actions of the subject. Because the activity is not automatically predetermined, Man is held accountable for those free acts and is judged ethically good or evil. But the coexistence of biological conditioning and personal traits makes the human animal a profound mystery, frequently expressed in the terms of “the Mind-Body problem”, where the findings of different sciences have to be brought together into a satisfactory synthesis. We need to look at rationality –personhood- from different viewpoints to inquire about its origin and consequences, at the individual and the social level.

Inputs from the fields of Biology, Metaphyics, Ethics, Theology and History, will lead to a better understanding of how the concept of Person has been incorporated in different cultures, in codes of Law and in patterns of behavior. From Biology we should clarify the role of bodily structures, of genetic programming and conditioning,, of possible malfunctions at the organic level that will influence human behavior. From physical and metaphysical considerations we have to establish a logically sufficient reason for the traits that define a person, thus providing a basis for the concepts of rights and duties (human dignity and responsibility).

This will be clarified and extended by the theological ideas of personal relationships with a Creator who is also personal in nature, and both the first source of being and the final end that constitutes our eternal destiny. How these ideas have in fact appeared in different cultures through human history should be taken into account as well, not to make our reasoning depend upon a kind of democratic consensus, but rather to see the limitations and even errors of restricted ways of thinking in merely natural terms. It is obvious that a complete development of this outline would require a very extensive treatment by different experts in all those fields, something clearly not possible within the limits of this essay.

SOURCES OF PERSONAL ACTIVITY – THE ORIGIN OF MAN

We are part of the panoply of life forms at the animal level here on planet Earth, the only place where we have data and where scientific studies are possible. It is well established from biology that there is an intimate relationship among all living beings in the sense that all use the same set of aminoacids with the same chirality, the same cell size, the same basic chemistry in a liquid medium (carbon compounds in water). From the first cells of 3500 million years ago an unbroken process of development can be traced up to the present variety of orders, genres and species, culminating in the primate level that includes Man. Even if five great extinction events (some of astronomical origin) have eliminated perhaps 90% of all previous living forms, there are no indications of multiple starts from inanimate matter. The tree of life has lost many branches and has sprouted new ones, but there is only one trunk. Both the geological record and comparative anatomy support this view of a common origin and progressive development (evolution), even if many details have to be worked out to establish genetic descent and the concrete steps that led to each species.

The two key questions that cannot be answered in a scientific way by the available data concern the steps from inorganic material to the first living cell and from non-intelligent primates to Man. We are interested at this point in the second one: what is there that explains the difference between instinctive behavior (no matter how wonderful) and the new way of knowing that leads to purposeful and responsible acts, thus establishing the personal character of the human animal. Is it logically possible to say that organic evolution suffices to expect the emergence of intelligence and free will as the natural outcome of brain development and other anatomical changes? This is the hotly debated problem of Body and Mind, that we can clarify by accurately defining both terms with the methodology of the physical sciences and our own subjective experience.

The study of the material world begins with our sense reactions to external stimuli that impinge upon our sense organs. This implies a form of energy , understanding this term as the capacity to change in some way the state of a recipient (doing work). In fact, all of physics –from astronomy to chemistry and atomic theory- is the study of interactions ruled by conservation laws , the most basic of them being that in any material process there is never a creation from nothing nor a reduction to nothing, but only some change of a previous reality of the material world. The effect of material activity can only be found in something that will have material properties and that will be able, in turn, to cause further material interactions: from matter, one can only expect to obtain matter.

Modern science attributes all interactions to 4 “forces”: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear. They have different intensities, ranges and outcomes, as well as the possibility of affecting only specific types of particles under concrete conditions. A common view that makes science possible as an objective description of the material world is stated as the “Cosmological Principle”: matter is the same everywhere in the Universe and it follows the same ways of acting under the same circumstances, so that the “Laws of Nature” are applicable everywhere and at all times. No cultural or personal conditionings or preferences will change the outcome of an experiment: human psychology has no influence outside the human person when we study the physical world. Scientific methodology requires that all processes be reproducible by any scientist using the correct experimental technique.

The only logical basis for this view is that human thought and free will cannot be considered as matter, endowed with the energies that cause the 4 interactions previously mentioned. This is also underlined by the obvious fact that neither can be measured in any experiment, since there are no parameters of mass, electrical charge, spin, wavelength, or anything else that physics uses to describe the components of matter. And if we deal with a new reality that is immaterial , we have to admit a source for it that is also immaterial: a human spirit that cannot be the result of organic evolution, even if it is found after matter has evolved to the highest degree of structure and complexity in the human brain.

A new spiritual element in Man needs a creating Spirit, a Creator who with a free act determines when and where the first Man appears on Earth after evolution has prepared the suitable organic structure. We can infer the presence of this new element in the life chain from evidence of rationality in the assembly of complex tools, the decoration of instruments and caves, the burials that include offerings for a mysterious life beyond the grave. Once the organic basis is sufficiently developed to be joined to the spirit, it is out of the realm of science to decide if the first Man had to be only one or several, at one point on Earth or many. The biological compatibility of all humans presently on Earth is a persuasive argument towards the acceptance of a single origin, geographically and in time. We are thus led to the statement that all human beings on Earth share the same nature, belong to the same species, have the same basic abilities and are subjects of the same rights and duties. They are Persons in the full sense of the word, without distinction of color, race, or culture.

Our conscious identity implies the unity of subject for all processes, material and intellectual, so that body and soul –matter and spirit- form a single unit in a mysterious but undeniable whole, excluding any accidental dualism. The human Person has to include the totality of Man, with mutual conditioning between matter and spirit, but with end-products of two clearly distinct levels. Any attempt to reduce Man to just spirit or just matter is unacceptable when applied to our total experience. Since our reasoning leads to a non-material (spiritual) reality as the source of thought and free will , we have the required reason for considering Man as a Person.

One rarely finds a denial of our body, but in some environments it seems logical to say that intelligence and free will can be explained in terms of electrical currents in the brain or quantum-mechanical effects in cellular structures. This is to reduce the real problem of sufficient reason to ways of detecting the presence of mental activity or of purposeful behavior. One cannot attribute the informational content of a TV show (interesting or boring) to the properties of the electrical currents in the receiver, or the poetic meaning of a literary work to the cellulose and ink of a book. The simple bending of an arm when I want is more important than the release of energy in the muscles and the leverage exerted by tendons and bones. The dependence upon a free decision excludes the deterministic process of simple physical forces, and the obvious fact that our will is not random but purposeful makes its operations incompatible with the probabilistic fluctuations of quantum-mechanical systems.

We know ourselves, and the world, by experience, by reasoning from sense inputs, and by acquiring knowledge from others. We first become aware of our thinking and of bodily changes from interactions between sense organs and “forces” in our surroundings. When the senses perceive and quantify inputs beyond their normal range of responses –with the help of instruments- we enter into the methodology of “science”, as applied to the properties and interactions of matter.

Intelligence looks for relations of cause, order (Beauty) and desirability (Goodness) in the data. This implies the use of the principles of identity, non contradiction and sufficient reason , that necessarily underlie all aspects of rational thought, be it in the development of science or in philosophy or theology. From the principle of identity we derive the constancy of behavior in non-living matter: things are what they are, and their properties determine their activity, thus supporting the objectivity and constancy of the laws of nature. The principle of non-contradiction requires self-consistency and the absence of absurd consequences in any reasoning process, so that in pure Math the only criterion of correct deductions is that they do not lead to a contradiction in their development or necessary consequences.

The search for a sufficient reason leads to hypothesis that should be examined in their theoretical sources, their logical consequences, and in the actual experimental checks when these are possible. We never accept as a sufficient reason a “just because” that doesn’t satisfy even a small child. This is frequently the real meaning of attributing to “chance” a physical result for which we have no known cause, as is the case when we try to establish a relationship between events that really have no logical connection. We should remember that chance is not experimentally measurable, it is not a parameter of any elementary particle or material structure, it can never be the cause of any event, and still less of order at any level.

The innate desire to find order in our knowledge is expressed in the search for patterns –physical or conceptual- where one finds the special satisfaction that we express with the general word beauty or harmony . It can be the simplicity and power of a mathematical expression or a generalized understanding of diverse aspects of nature previously unconnected in our experience: we can appreciate the beauty of the Law of Gravitation, applying to common objects, to planets and galaxies, and expressed with a simple equation by Newton. It is not uncommon for scientists to judge a hypothesis or theory in terms of its beauty: it introduces nothing superfluous or contrived or, on the contrary, seems cumbersome and arbitrary.

The same is true in the world of nature or art: combinations of shapes, volumes, lines and colors can give the pleasure of balance, proportion, contrast, gradual development, even just marvelous complexity at the microscopic level or overwhelming majesty in the grandeur of the heavens. It has been said that science develops from the sense of wonder that the thinking person cannot avoid feeling when studying nature at all levels. And it is well known that cave Man left paintings of great skill and beauty, as well as carvings and even primitive musical instruments: activities that have no relationship with mere survival or other practical concerns. They might have been considered of some magical value, but this is precisely the new “spiritual” aspect of human activity that includes symbols and concepts that are not found in any other species in the living world.

The search for Goodness is due to a value judgment regarding the suitability of some action to obtain a desirable end. Anything that is consonant with our needs, either at the biological or spiritual level, constitutes a good, from survival (which includes food, shelter, rest) to the fulfillment of our desire for affection, companionship and even knowledge and beauty, can be classified as a good that attracts and leads to activities ordered to obtain it. Whether those activities are consonant with human dignity –of the subject and of others- or opposed to it, determines the ethical value of an action.

ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES

Since the human person has some activities of a private order, while others impinge upon other members of the human family, the way human activity is subjected to norms and value judgments will address the question of what is consonant with human nature at both levels.

The development of rationality requires the constant search for Truth: no responsible decision can be based on wrong knowledge. This implies rights and duties concerning education, beginning with the family and continued at higher levels, made possible by society, not to impose any “brain washing” but to open all legitimate avenues of learning. Professional activities require competence that has to be acquired by learning in the proper institutions, and that then implies the right to compensation for services in any field.

The right to the necessary sustenance, to health care, to housing and work opportunities, will also be a consequence of the need to develop the individual, both physically and culturally. Society needs laws that ensure that this is the case for all citizens. International bodies are legitimately entitled to regulate commerce, travel, exchange of information, in order to achieve equal opportunities for everybody. Echoing Pope John Paul II at the UN, “society is for the individual, not the other way around”.

This is stated in the Declaration of Human Rights signed by members of the UN in 1948. These rights are not due to some concession by any kind of government, and they cannot be legitimally abrogated or conculcated. Because those rights are rooted on the very nature of the human person, they have to be respected at any stage of natural life , from conception to death, even if age, sickness or genetic disabilities make the full use of intelligence and free will impossible in some cases or circumstances.

The Person can never be reduced to the level of a “thing” to be manipulated or disposed of for economic or scientific reasons. This is especially relevant in the fields of Medicine or Biology: no treatment can be allowed for any other purpose than the good of the patient. Laws that ignore this norm cannot be legally binding, but must be resisted and repelled.

Because ethical considerations flow necessarily from the sense of dignity and responsibility of an intelligent subject, this aspect of human life must be present from the very moment that Man appears on Earth. Primitive burials are a clear sign of the conviction that other humans are different from animals and that somehow their existence after death must be helped by rites and objects that must accompany the deceased. The evidence of protracted care for the sick (for instance, when people subjected to a trepanning of the skull lived long enough for the bone to heal and close the opening) is another indication of family and social ties that imply a common feeling of dependence and duties for those unable to survive by themselves.

Still, in a primitive world where small groups lived in almost total isolation from other tribes, ethical norms developed in many different ways. Science, philosophy, art and ethical norms, form human culture , that is not inherited genetically, but transmitted by signs, endowed -arbitrarily and freely- with meaning : sounds (speech), visible forms (writing, comprehensible images) or gestures that convey information, a new category not found by any experiment. Because cultures evolved independently, different places and times gave rise to codes of ethics and laws that –in many cases- contradicted each other.

We can simply mention how all over the world we find indications of past slavery,, caste systems, denials of rights to women and children, human sacrifices, war as the common state of confrontation with nearby groups. But this kind of behavior is akin to the modern control of the individual by totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Communist societies) and it is necessary to state that a significant number of signatories of the UN “Declaration of Human Rights” still fail to comply with the solemn compromise accepted in 1948. In those the human Person is rather considered only as a productive element for the impersonal State, and it is subjected to a control that restricts even the most basic rights of education, work, marriage and free movement, the practice of religion and association for legitimate ends.

In modern times, where the constant exchange of information and world-wide travel tend to create a uniform way of life, the final outcome of such contacts might lead to a common “culture” where the individual is led to think that whatever others do is correct for everybody. An implicit “relativism” will finally deny that there are ethical norms that arise from human nature itself and that anything that is not forbidden by law is morally acceptable. This is the underlying justification for abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation: instances where the person is degraded to the level of laboratory guinea pigs, useful as “things” to be manipulated for the benefit of others or destroyed when they become cumbersome and unprofitable for society.

A common statement that expresses this attitude is that “all cultures are equally to be respected”. If the word “culture” is not defined, the statement is meaningless: it can mean the way a group builds homes or entertains their citizens with music and dances. The most basic meaning should rather be the “system of common ideas that structure a given society”. Those ideas should determine personal and social behavior, thus being incorporated into codes of law, administrative and practical structures, rules of personal behavior. Over the course of time, the “way of life” transmitted from one generation to another within a human group, can also be termed a “culture” in so far as it incorporates commonly held values and concerns.

But the appreciation of a culture cannot simply rest upon its existence through a short or long time. If the culture leads to the denial of human rights to any kind of member of the group, or it incorporates a negative and hostile attitude toward other groups, the culture has no right to be respected and preserved. We must remember again and again that the human person is the subject of rights and duties by the dignity that is rooted upon the unique power to think and act freely. No external imposition can legitimately deprive a single person of what nature implies. Even civil disobedience might become a moral duty, no matter what the consequences, when moral good and evil are concerned.

One should also mention that the right of every person to have access to education, health care, modern developments of a kind that improves substantially human life, should take precedence upon considerations of an egotistical nature even if they seem to be justified by the desire to maintain primitive tribes in their original state to allow for their scientific study. To deny to a sick child the life saving attention that it needs and the opportunity to learn and develop fully as a human being is not acceptable from the moral viewpoint, either in a slum of a modern city or in the jungle of the heart of Africa. We might be unable to provide that help everywhere, but it should be our impossibility and nor a false respect for a primitive culture the deciding factor.

Governments everywhere have the duty to eradicate every type of exploitation of the weak and poor, be it through some kind of slave labor or its equivalent, or the demeaning traffic of drugs and prostitution, or racial and religious intolerance. The human person –every person- is the highest value we find on Earth.

Global concerns –about climate, overpopulation, famine, migration – are clearly in need of ethical rules that should look at the good of the persons affected, now and in the future, but destroying lives or condemning undeveloped nations to hunger and ignorance cannot be an option. The resources of our planet are more than sufficient to give every human being a level of nutrition, housing, education and medical care suitable for human dignity.

THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The human spirit, created by a Personal Creator, intelligent and free, appears as the apex of the development of the Universe. The Anthropic coincidences, at the very first instant of the Big Bang, can only be explained by a purposeful plan of the Creator to establish a meaningful relationship with personal beings. To invoke for their existence either a childish ”just because”, or to have recourse to chance within an unverifiable multitude of universes, is unscientific and totally empty of explanatory power. On the other hand, an intelligent and infinite Creator will not act without a purpose, and this cannot be an empty desire to watch how stars burn or lizards scurry over a planet. A Person is not satisfied with anything less than other persons.

This means that the “deistic” God accepted by some scientists as the final reason “why there is something instead of nothing” ends up by being absurd. Such a Supreme Creator would create a marvelous Universe just as a banal exercise of omnipotence, without caring for the persons who are able to reason to a First Cause and to be grateful for their existence. This is still more absurd if we extrapolate the evolution of the Universe to remote future ages when all the stars will be dead cinders and no life can survive anywhere.

In some Eastern philosophies, the final state implies the dissolution of individual persons into an undiferentiated “something”, not truly divine in a transcendent sense, where personal identity is lost. This is philosophically untenable and incompatible with the true idea of a Creator who is always infinitely superior and different from any creature: one cannot take seriously the proposal that finite and infinite will become an undifferentiated mixture and that the very notion of person will no longer be applicable. The same can be said of the recycling of human beings through reincarnations where the distinction between persons and animals is erased. And the final state, after the supposed purification attained in those reincarnations is described once more as the cessation of personal existence and activity.

In the Christian Creed, God is confessed as a Trinity, where the concept of Person surpasses our philosophical intuitions by presenting a unique Nature realized in three distinct Persons, with only one intelligence and will, so necessarily related that no single Person can exist or be described without reference to the other two. Thus the unicity of the Divinity is insisted upon, while stressing the divine life as a total and necessary communication of the entire nature from the Father to the Son and from both to the Holy Spirit. We cannot understand this, but we cannot understand matter either, when we try to reconcile the particle-wave duality into a single picture of elementary units of everyday matter.

No human philosophy or poetic effort could have imagined the Trinity, and we can only accept it through a Revelation that was not present in the Old Testament books of the Bible but that was gradually uncovered in the teachings of the New Testament. As we develop Theology –the effort to understand the revealed truths- we come to appreciate the depth of this mystery where the most intimate nature of the Godhead, while still incomprehensible, appears as the logical source of God’s relationship to humankind. If in the creation of finite spirits (angels) God can be said to seek living images of the divine nature, endowed with intelligence and free will and existing without constraints of space and time, their perfectly simple nature is so completely indivisible and self-contained that the communication of life –the very essence of the Trinity- cannot be shared by the created beings. They are incomplete images of the living God in that respect.

The creation of matter does provide the possibility of finding complex structures that can give part of themselves as a seed for new members of the species. But matter cannot have intelligence and free will, thus precluding the existence of Persons within the realm of pure matter. Without those attributes, there can be no meaningful relationship with the Creator.

The further step of joining matter and spirit in Man does achieve the complete image of God as a reality endowed with intelligence, free will and the ability to communicate life. Thus we find the description of the origin of Man in the poetic language of Genesis. Everything leads to the masterpiece of divine power, an Image and Likeness of the Creator, destined to share the divine happiness in a final state of intimate knowledge and love, outside the limits of space and time.

The Incarnation adds another mystery regarding the concept of Person, while underlining the infinite love of God and the dignity of Man. Christ, as God-Man, is adored as God, while being true Man, with soul and body on a par with ours. But we profess only one Person, divine, as the ultimate subject of activity and attribution, so that human activities are attributed to God and divine activities to the Man Jesus. Again, we cannot truly understand the mystery, but we can say that God has entered the human family, and that no greater glory can be imagined for any possible created being than to have God as brother.

It is true that we cannot do more than to accept a mystery that has baffled the best minds through the centuries, giving rise to all kinds of efforts to avoid the true divinity of Christ or to attribute to his humanity a nature that ultimately would deny his common descent from other human members of our race. Councils and Church Fathers were adamant in their insistence on the dual nature of Christ in the unity of a divine Person. Only thus could the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption be truly maintained.

Christ’s Resurrection is the final act of the saving and transforming plan of God for all mankind. A divine Person, with a body taken from the ashes of stars that formed our Earth and with a human mind and will, encompasses all levels of existence and carries our human nature to the intimate essence of the Godhead as the first fruits of the new kind of life that God wants for all of us. As individual persons, we are destined to exist forever, attaining the fullness of life with unlimited knowledge satisfying our minds and infinite love giving us the happiness proper of God in an unchanging eternity. The incredible variety of each human being through all of history will be a galaxy of lights, each different in a unique way of reflecting the perfection of the Creator, thus expressing as persons the multiple ways of sharing in the generosity of the Father from whom all good things come.

In terms of physical laws, the future of the Universe, with its predictable final state of emptiness, darkness and cold, seems to make its existence pointless, and the fact of the creation by God so that human persons will appear would no longer seem its sufficient reason. The only answer to the apparent absurd could be found in the immortality of the human spirit, not tied to the laws of physics by its very nature. But Theology goes farther, asserting for the human Person, body and soul, this new life inchoated by Christ’s resurrection and promised to all those who are joined to Him in a new kind of activity that is proper to God alone and that will be shared outside the limits of space and time.

Only in Christian Theology, based upon clear concepts of God and Man, of matter and spirit, is the unique dignity of each Person conserved.

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What It Means to Be a Human Person

It is time we get clear about the ontology of personhood..

Posted December 10, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Christian Smith's excellent book, "What is a Person?," clearly spells out an ontology of human persons for sociology.
• The Unified Theory gives a clear ontology of the mental that directly aligns with Smith's view of human persons.
• There is now a clear bridge from psychology into sociology that clarifies the ontology of both mental behavior and human persons.

A central feature of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) is that it affords us a way to scientifically frame the ontology of the mental (see here for this argument in detail). Via the Tree of Knowledge System, it shows how "mental evolution" began with the evolution of animals with nervous systems and complex active bodies during the Cambrian Explosion approximately 550,000,000 years ago. In addition, it clearly defines the mental behaviors of "minded animals" as consisting of sensory-motor looping functions that allow animals to develop paths of behavior investment via recursive relevance realization that produce a functional effect on the animal-environment relationship. Moreover, via the Map of Mind 1,2,3 , UTOK specifies why there are three domains of mental behavioral processes that must be differentiated, both ontologically and epistemologically.

The domain of Mind 1 refers to the domain of covert neurocognitive processes (Mind 1a ) that regulate the overt mental behavioral activities that are observable to others (Mind 1b ). Mind 2 refers to the subjective conscious experience of being in the world and it is only directly observable from the inside, that is from the subjective perspective of the animal. Mind 3 is present in human persons and refers to the self-conscious justification processes that take place within the individual's subjective field of experience (Mind 3a ) or between people in the form of verbal expressions to others (Mind 3b ).

Getting clear about the ontology of the mental is necessary to solve the problem of psychology. And this is a necessary step to link psychology to the social sciences. Indeed, it is at the intersection between psychology and the social sciences (as well as humanities and philosophy ) that we find one of the most central problems in the academy, which pertains to the question of what is a person? This question is directly taken up in Professor Christian Smith’s excellent work, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life and the Moral Good From the Person Up .

Smith tackles this perspective from the vantage point of critical realism and personalism. Critical realism is the philosophy of science developed by the visionary Roy Bhaskar It can be thought of as developing a synthetic, " metamodern " philosophical position that effectively bridges between modernist scientific traditions that emphasize analytic truth claims and postmodern critical positions that emphasize the social construction of knowledge. That is, critical realism effectively works to clarify both the process by which humans socially construct knowledge (i.e., epistemology) and the scientific reality of nature as stratified levels of complexity (i.e., ontology). Smith combines this with personalism, which he acknowledges is less easy to summarize as a clear statement. He characterized personalism as a broad school of thought and collection of thinkers that enables us to emphasize the reality of human lived experience and human dignity. Smith puts the issue as follows:

The central idea in personalism that is relevant for my argument is deceptively simple. This is the belief that human beings are persons.

At first, this might sound silly as it seems self-evident and thus might appear to be akin to saying something like dogs are canines. But it is not. In fact, it is very consequential because persons are a particular kind of thing . Indeed, a central insight from UTOK’s analysis of the mental and the difference between animal-mental behavior and human mental behavior is the conclusion that humans are both primates and persons.

The question thus emerges regarding what Christian means by a person. Through a long series of detailed and powerful arguments, Christian delineates how personhood has emerged in evolutionary and social history and consists of a long list of intersecting capacities. Ultimately, he comes to define persons as follows:

By person I mean a conscious, reflective, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity , moral commitment, and social communication who—as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions—exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own communicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and the nonpersonal world.

Smith’s analysis of the ontology of human persons is remarkably consistent with UTOK’s analysis of the ontology of the mental, from the animal into the human, and then into the emergence of the Culture-Person plane of existence. Indeed, I have argued repeatedly that the key to understanding humans from a scientific perspective grounded in a coherent ontology is to see them as primates that are organized by the two metatheories of Behavioral Investment Theory and the Influence Matrix and as persons, which is framed by Justification Systems Theory. Justification Systems Theory provides a framework for understanding the emergence of the domain of Mind 3 and the Culture-Person plane of existence. It aligns remarkably well with Smith’s analysis.

Importantly, Smith is a sociologist, not a psychologist. Indeed, his book has almost no psychology in it at all. Rather the book positions his argument for the ontology of human persons in relationship to other traditions in sociology, such as social constructionist traditions, network structuralist positions, and variable aggregate analyses. As such, we have a strong, independent, convergent argument, when the two positions are placed side by side.

According to the UTOK, the Enlightenment failed to produce a clear framework for understanding the proper relationships between matter and mind and science and social knowledge. This is called the Enlightenment Gap . It resides at that center of our modern state of chaotic fragmented pluralism. This gap means that we cannot go from our relatively coherent knowledge in the physical and biological sciences into the psychological and social sciences. Although he did not directly call it as such, the gap was nevertheless very well seen by Edward O. Wilson in his important book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge . He described it as follows (p. 126):

We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in the final analysis, joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of far-flung societies? That, in my opinion, is the nub of the relationship between the two cultures. It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and the humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences. At present time no one has a solution. But in the sense that no one in 1842 knew the true cause of evolution and in 1952 no one knew the nature of the genetic code, the way to solve the problem may lie within our grasp.

Another way of saying this is that the Enlightenment left us with a gap in scientifically understanding the ontological evolution of the animal mental into human persons and modern societies. This is why we cannot clearly trace the ontological trail from biology into the animal mind into a clear map of human mental behavior and the assemblages of societies.

UTOK’s frame affords us a way to bridge and resolve the Enlightenment Gap. Most importantly, it affords a coherent naturalistic ontology for the animal-mental into the culture-person plane of existence. Put differently, via its unified theory of psychology, UTOK bridges the gap from ethology and cognitive-behavioral neuroscience into human psychology. This "human psychology" sits at the base of the social sciences and frames human mental behavior.

What is so encouraging about Christian Smith’s work is that it shows how we can pick up the baton of understanding from human psychology and place it directly at the base of sociology, and from there advance into the social sciences that study large-scale social systems. Success in this means that the stage is being set for our capacity to resolve the Enlightenment Gap. This will enable us to start moving toward a second Enlightenment that gives rise to a scientific understanding of a coherent naturalistic ontology that is well situated to revitalize the human soul and spirit in the 21st century.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

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• > The Human Person in Contemporary Philosophy1

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The human person in contemporary philosophy 1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

I. In the early part of the sixth century a.d. Boethius defined the person as “an individual substance of rational nature” ( rationalis naturae individua substantia ). This definition, which became classical and was adopted by, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, obviously implies that every human being is a person, since every human being is (to employ the philosophical terms of Boethius) an individual substance of rational nature. If one cannot be more or less of a human being, so far as “substance” is concerned, one cannot be more or less of a person. One may act as a human person ought not to act or in a way unbefitting a human person; one may even lose the normal use of one's reason; but one does not in this way become depersonalized, in the sense of ceasing to be a person. According to St. Thomas, a disembodied soul is not, strictly speaking, a person, since a disembodied soul is no longer a complete human substance; but every complete human substance is always and necessarily a person.

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page 5 note 1 Unscientific Postscript , p. 85 Google Scholar .

page 5 note 2 Ibid. , p. 108.

page 5 note 3 The Philosophy of Existence , p. 89.

page 5 note 4 Ibid. , p. 1.

page 7 note 1 With Marcel the idea of person is, I should say, much more in evidence than that of existence. But then Marcel resigns himself to being called, rather than claims to be, an existentialist.

page 8 note 1 Révolution personnaliste et communautaire , p. 67.

page 8 note 2 Politique de la personne , p. 56.

page 8 note 3 Manifeste au service du personnalisme; Esprit , October, 1936.

page 9 note 1 Politique de la personne , pp. 52–3. De Rougemont is, incidentally, a Protestant, while Mounier is a Catholic.

page 10 note 1 Equivoques du personnalisme and Tâches actuelles d'une pensée d'inspiration personnaliste; Esprit , February, 1947 and November, 1948.

page 10 note 2 In attempting to understand the well-meant efforts of certain French Christians to find a bridge between Christianity and Marxism one must, of course, bear in mind the difference between the French and English political scenes, however one may finally evaluate these efforts.

page 10 note 3 The Person and the Common Good , p. 27.

page 12 note 1 L'Être et le Néant , p. 516.

page 13 note 1 L'Être et le Néant , p. 520.

page 13 note 2 The Philosophy of Existence , p. 63.

page 13 note 3 L' Être et le Néant , p. 520.

page 13 note 4 Ibid. , p. 76.

page 13 note 5 Homo viator , p. 26.

page 14 note 1 Homo viator , pp. 32–33.

page 14 note 2 The Philosophy of Existence , p. 30.

page 15 note 1 Freedom and the Spirit , pp. 117 and 121.

page 15 note 2 De l'Acte , p. 189.

page 16 note 1 De l'Acte , p. 185.

page 16 note 2 Ibid.

page 16 note 3 Obstacle et Valeur , p. 321. The “double cogito” refers to the moi public and the moi intime .

page 16 note 4 Ibid. , p. 322.

page 17 note 1 Obstacle et Valeur , p. 321.

page 17 note 2 Traité de morale générale , p. 481.

page 17 note 3 Obstacle et Valeur , p. 194.

page 17 note 4 Ibid. , pp. 345 and 344.

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• Volume 25, Issue 92
• Frederick C. Copleston
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100007762

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The Human Person

What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology

• © 2019
• Thomas L. Spalding 0 ,
• James M. Stedman 1 ,
• Christina L. Gagné 2 ,
• Matthew Kostelecky 3

Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

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The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA

St. joseph’s college at the university of alberta, edmonton, canada.

• Discusses the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person
• Reviews the ways in which the Aristotelian-Thomistic view can provide a philosophically sound foundation for modern psychology
• Offers an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to theoretical psychology and cognitive science
• Represents the first attempt to apply classical realism to all or most areas of modern psychology

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This book introduces the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the human person to a contemporary audience, and reviews the ways in which this view could provide a philosophically sound foundation for modern psychology. The book presents the current state of psychology and offers critiques of the current philosophical foundations. In its presentation of the fundamental metaphysical commitments of the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, it places the human being within the broader understanding of the world.

Chapters discuss the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of human and non-human cognition as well as the relationship between cognition and emotion. In addition, the book discusses the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human growth and development, including how the virtue theory relates to current psychological approaches to normal human development, the development of character problems that lead to psychopathology, current conceptions of positive psychology, and the place of the individual in the social world. The book ends with a summary of how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory relates to science in general and psychology in particular.

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Chapter 2: Containing Material Which None But Students of Psychology and Ethics Need Peruse

Research on Developmental Psychology

The Cartesian Conception of the Development of the Mind and Its Neo-Aristotelian Alternative

• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics
• Thomas Aquinas
• Theoretical Psychology
• Embodied Cognition
• Flourishing
• Human and Non-Human Animal Cognition
• Concepts and Categorization

Table of contents (8 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Thomas L. Spalding, James M. Stedman, Christina L. Gagné, Matthew Kostelecky

The Metaphysical Foundations of the Human Person

Human and non-human cognition, embodied and humanistic views of cognition, emotion and cognition, human flourishing, the human in society, summary and conclusions, back matter, authors and affiliations.

Thomas L. Spalding, Christina L. Gagné

James M. Stedman

Matthew Kostelecky

About the authors

Thomas L. Spalding is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Associate Dean Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on the psychology of concepts and the relation between the human conceptual and language systems and has been funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He is the author of over 65 journal articles and book chapters and over 100 conference presentations and invited talks.

James M. Stedman is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas, Health Science Center at San Antonio. He has written on an array of topics in psychology, including child clinical pathology and treatment, education in clinical and counseling psychology, and application of Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy to modern psychology.

Christina L. Gagné isa Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on the human conceptual system and compositionality/productivity within the conceptual system and language system.  Dr. Gagné’s research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and she has been the author on over 70 book chapters and journal articles and over 100 conference presentations and invited talks.  She has served on several editorial boards and is an associate editor of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Morphology.

Matthew Kostelecky is an Associate Professor, Philosophy, at St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta. He works on the history of philosophy with a particular focus on medieval metaphysics and cognitive theory. He is the author of multiple articles on the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, his sources, and his larger context. Additionally, he is the author of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles: a mirror of human nature , a monograph that disentangles the role and method of metaphysics from the other sciences in Thomas Aquinas’s thought, while simultaneously presenting his account of human nature.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : The Human Person

Book Subtitle : What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology

Authors : Thomas L. Spalding, James M. Stedman, Christina L. Gagné, Matthew Kostelecky

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33912-8

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science and Psychology , Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-33911-1 Published: 19 December 2019

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-33914-2 Published: 19 December 2020

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-33912-8 Published: 13 December 2019

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIII, 172

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations

Topics : Cognitive Psychology , Philosophy of Mind , Personality and Social Psychology , History of Psychology , Ontology

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Philosophy of the Human Person Essay

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The reason why Plato’s Phaedrus even today continues to be referred to as the one of world’s most prominent philosophical dialogues is that, besides being rhetorically refined, this dialogue also contains a number of logically substantiated insights into the very essence of cognition, as the process that comfortably combines the seemingly incompatible elements of desire and inquiry.

In my paper, I will aim to substantiate the validity of this idea in regards to how Socrates theorized the nature of an interrelationship between one’s irrational desires, on the one hand, and his or her varying ability to turn these desires into the tool of attaining an intellectual enlightenment, on the other.

The foremost thesis, which serves Socrates’ Second Speech as its theoretical foundation, is the assumption of soul’s immortality. Socrates substantiates the validity of this assumption by pointing out to the fact that it is only a qualitatively superior force, which is being capable of setting into the motion a derivative (and therefore inferior) force.

Since the motions of one’s body can be well conceptualized as the physical emanations of the affiliated soul’s strive towards self-actualization, and since human bodies are mortal, then people’s souls must be necessarily immortal, “All soul is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal” (Hamilton & Huntington 492).

In its turn, this presupposes the existence of a higher metaphysical reality, the qualitative aspects of which can be theorized by the mean of people subjecting the actual significance of the surrounding reality’s observable emanations to a rational inquiry.

However, in order for them to be able to succeed in this, they would have to be aware of the fact that the reality’s observable emanations cannot be referred to as ‘things in themselves’, as these emanations are being nothing but the shadows of what they actually reflect.

Given people’s imperfectness, as compared to what it is being the case with gods, the only way for them to be able to gain the metaphysical understanding of the reality emanations’ true meaning is transcending the cognitive boundaries of their sense of rationale, while in the process of conducting a rational inquiry.

Hence, the Socrates’ conceptualization of ‘madness’ (which can extrapolate itself in the form of an irrational love), as being simultaneously both: the obstacle on the way of conducting a scientific inquiry, and the pathway towards attaining enlightenment, “That would be right if it were an invariable truth that madness is an evil, but in reality, the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven sent” (Hamilton & Huntington 491).

According to Socrates, one’s soul can be compared to a chariot, in which the charioteer (rational inquiry) steers two incompatibly behaving winged horses of the irrational desire (wanton) and the rational sanity.

Whereas, the rational soul strives to gain more understanding of the surrounding reality’s very essence, its ‘horse’ of the irrational desire is being primarily preoccupied with exploiting this reality as the mean of experiencing a variety of sensual pleasures.

The ‘horse’ of rational sanity, on the other hand, prevents the ‘horse’ of irrational desire from assuming the role of the soul’s charioteer.

Socrates also suggests that it is in the nature of every soul to aim to remain in the metaphysical realm of gods for as long as possible (by the mean of acquiring a rationale-based knowledge, as to the essence of the surrounding reality), even though that in most cases this proves utterly challengeable, because as opposed to what it is being the case with the chariots of gods’ souls, the chariots of human souls are being driven by horses that do not act uniformly, “With us men, in the first place, it is a pair of steeds that the charioteer controls; moreover one of them is noble and good, and of good stock, while the other has the opposite character, and his stock is opposite” (Hamilton & Huntington 493).

Given the fact that, according to Socrates, one’s ability to appreciate beauty reflects his or her ability to define the dialectical relationship between causes and effects, the sensation of love (Eros) is being of an essentially rational nature, because one’s endowment with this sensation signifies the concerned individual’s possession of a philosophical mind.

This is because beauty is nothing but the one of many emanations of a higher truth. Therefore, the philosopher’s ability to fall in love with a particular individual should be regarded as yet another indication of the sheer measure of this philosopher’s intellectual advancement and consequently – of the extent of philosopher’s godliness.

In order to illustrate the significance of his line of argumentation, in regards to the meaning of love-inspired ‘madness’, Socrates allegorizes one’s ability to fall in love in terms of such an individual soul’s ability to grow ‘wings’, which in turn increase this soul’s chances to soar in the realm of gods for as long as possible, “The natural property of a wing is to raise that which is heavy and carry it aloft to the region where the gods dwell, and more than any other bodily part it shares in the divine nature, which is fair, wise, and good, and possessed of all other such excellences” (Hamilton & Huntington 493).

That is, by becoming romantically involved with another individual (lover), a particular philosophically minded person is able to bypass the cognitive limitations of its rationale on the way of attaining wiseness. The same applies to the individuals, affiliated with other forms of ‘divine madness’, such as poets, prophets and mystics.

This, in turn, allows such a person to gain a qualitative insight into the metaphysical essence of the reality’s observable emanations – hence, creating objective preconditions for him to be able to take a practical advantage of its ‘madness’-based wiseness.

This is exactly the reason why, according to Socrates, it is not the individuals capable of merely appeasing the listening crowds emotionally, who prove themselves supreme orators, but those who understand the true nature of things, “The art of speech displayed by one who has gone chasing after beliefs, instead of knowing the truth, will be a comical sort of art, in fact no art at all.” (Hamilton & Huntington 508).

And, as it was mentioned earlier, the pathway towards gaining an awareness of the true nature of things is one’s willingness to grow ‘wings’, which often extrapolates itself in the form of what appears to be an irrational passion.

At the same time, however, it is crucially important to those in the process of growing ‘wings’ to never cease exercising a rational control over the ‘horse’ of their souls’ animalistic desire (wanton).

This is because, by allowing its divine ‘madness’ to be turned into the tool of experiencing solely sensual pleasures, the individual’s soul falls back to the earth and ends up being denied an opportunity of a qualitatively higher rebirth for a long time.

As Socrates pointed out, “Now he whose vision of the mystery is long past… when he beholds that which is called beautiful here; wherefore he looks upon it with no reverence, and surrendering to pleasure he essays to go after the fashion of a four-footed beast, and to beget offspring of the flesh, or consorting with wantonness he has no fear nor shame in running after unnatural pleasure” (Hamilton & Huntington 497).

Therefore, in order for souls to continue growing ‘wings’, while ensuring that these ‘wings’ do not get cut off by the ‘charioteer’s’ inability to exercise a complete control of the ‘horse’ of an irrational desire, people may never cease being observant of the principle of moderation, while addressing life’s challenges.

This provides us with the insight into the concept of the so-called ‘platonic love’, which serves the dual purpose of providing a particular individual with the opportunity to experience an aesthetic pleasure and to expand its intellectual horizons.

Thus, it will be thoroughly appropriate to suggest that in his Second Speech , Socrates did manage to resolve the seeming inconsistency between the notions of passion-based desire and rationale-based scientific inquiry.

This was accomplished by the mean of him exposing the very notion of passion as such that is being equally capable of serving the cause of an intellectual enlightenment (in cases when passion is being affiliated with one’s aesthetic anxieties) and the cause of an intellectual degradation (in cases when passion is being affiliated with one’s sensual anxieties).

As it was implied in the Introduction, despite the utterly idealistic sounding of the Socrates’ line of argumentation, concerned with exposing the actual nature of the dialectical relationship between passion and rationale, this argumentation even today represents a fully valid discursive value.

Apparently, there is a way to remedy the crisis between desire and inquiry. As Plato (through Socrates) has shown it, both: desire and inquiry are being equally capable of helping people to get closer to the divine. I believe that this conclusion is being fully consistent with the paper’s initial thesis.

Works Cited

Hamilton, Edith & Huntington, Cairns. The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Print.

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What is a human person an exploration & critique of contemporary perspectives.

Emmanuel Cumplido Follow

Zeyl, Donald, J.

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mind; soul; brain; knowledge; identity; bioethics

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What is a Human Person? An Exploration and Critique of Physicalist Perspectives

Emmanuel Cumplido

Faculty Sponsor: Donald Zeyl, Philosophy

Answers to the question “What is a human person?” that have garnered the allegiance of people throughout millennia fall under two broad categories: “physicalism” and “dualism”. One of the earliest renditions of physicalism was the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists. In their view, all of reality could be explained through two principles: atoms and empty space. As a consequence, people were thought to be nothing but assemblages of atoms in space. Plato’s Phaedo presents one of the earliest philosophical endorsements of dualism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial mind, or soul, that is the grounds for a human person's identity. The idea that a human person is, fundamentally, an immaterial mind or soul that can survive bodily death has also been a long-standing position for many of the world’s major religions in both Western and Eastern traditions. With a recent revival of academic interest in studying consciousness, the debate on human nature has been receiving some special treatment in academia. In my project I aim to critique the dominant physicalist perspective by drawing out its implications for several other areas of human life. Specifically, the troubling consequences physicalism has in relation to epistemology, personal identity, and ethics. Along the way, I will give a brief apologia for dualism as a serious intellectual position that resolves the problems which physicalism presents

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The Human Person as an Embodied Spirit

One of the dominant themes in the course Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person is the idea that the human person is an embodied spirit. But first of all, we need to define terms here because, as it appears, the meaning of the concept “ embodied spirit ” is not directly clear to students who do not have a strong background and orientation in philosophy. So, what do we exactly mean by “embodied spirit”?

The most direct connotation that comes to mind when we say something is “embodied” is that it is being materialized or incarnated. Hence, when we say “embodied spirit”, we normally thought of a spirit being incarnated. However, the idea of the human person as an “embodied spirit” does not necessarily refer to the incarnation or materialization of spirit as an immaterial entity. The embodiment of the spirit in the context of Christian philosophy (as is well known, the concept of the embodied spirit is specific to Christian philosophy) specifically refers to the inseparable union of body and soul. Thus, when we say “embodied spirit” we mean that the body is not separate from the soul, just as the soul is not separate from the body.

So, when we say that the human person is an embodied spirit , we specifically mean that the human person is the point of convergence between the material and spiritual entities, that is, between the body and soul. We cannot talk, therefore, of the human person without the union of body and soul, just as we cannot talk of anything without the union of (as Aristotle would have us believe) matter and form.

Now, to understand the specificity of the human person as an embodied spirit is important because aside from the fact that it enables us to know our potentialities and limitations, it also exposes us to a thorough and deeper understanding of ourselves as a unique creature united by body and soul. With this caveat in mind, let us now proceed to an engagement with one of the most famous philosophers in this particular scholarship, namely, Aristotle.

Aristotle on the Human Person as an Embodied Spirit

Before we engage Aristotle’s account on the human person as an embodied spirit, that is, again, as a union of body and soul, it is important at this point to provide the theoretical context of this issue. As we may already know, Aristotle’s account of the human person as an embodied spirit is in large part a reaction against Plato’s take on the nature of the human person.

For Plato, the nature of the human person is seen in the metaphysical dichotomy between body and soul. This dichotomy implies that there is an inherent contradiction between the body and the soul. On the one hand, the body, according to Plato, is material; hence, it is mutable and destructible. On the other hand, the soul is immaterial; hence, it is immutable and indestructible.

Inasmuch as the body is material, mutable, and destructible, while the soul is immaterial, immutable, and indestructible, Plato contends that in the context of the nature of the human person, the body’s existence is dependent on the soul while the soul’s existence is independent of the body. In fact, in the Timaeus , Plato argues that the soul existed prior to the body. Plato writes: “…the gods made the soul prior to the body and more venerable in birth and excellence to the body’s mistress and governor”. Interestingly then, as Eddie Babor claims, the contention above made Plato conclude that the human person is just a soul using a body.

According to Plato, there are three parts of the soul, namely, the rational , the spiritual , and the appetitive . Plato tells The Myth of the Charioteer to comprehend the complex nature of the soul, but we will not discuss this topic here since our task here is just to provide an overview of Plato’s account of the human person, which serves as a background to Aristotle’s account of the human person as an embodied spirit.

For Plato, the rational soul is located in the head, the spiritual soul in the chest, and the appetitive in the abdomen. According to Plato, the spiritual and appetitive souls contribute to the motion and activity of the whole person, while the rational soul’s function is to guide the spiritual and appetitive souls.

According to Plato, the appetitive part of the soul drives the human person to experience thirst, hunger, and other physical wants, while the spiritual soul drives the human person to experience abomination, anger, and other emotional feelings. Lastly, it is the rational part of the soul that enables the human person to think, reflect, analyze, comprehend, draw conclusions, and the like.

As we can see, the rational soul, which is the highest of all parts of the soul, guides the other two parts, namely, the appetitive and the spiritual. “What else could perform this guiding function, from Plato’s point of view, than the rational part of the soul? Think of a desperately thirsty man in the desert. He sees a pool of water and approaches it with all the eagerness that deprivation is able to create. But when he reaches the pool, he sees a sign: ‘Danger. Do not drink. Polluted.’ He experiences conflict within. His desire urges him to drink. But reason tells him that such signs usually indicate the truth, that polluted water will make him very ill or may kill him, and that if he drinks he will probably be worse off than he doesn’t. He decides not to drink. In this case, it is the rational part of the soul that opposes his desire. His reason guides him away from the water.”

The principle then that drives the person to drink is called “appetite”, while the principle that forbids the person to drink the water because it is polluted is called “reason”.

“Another example could be that of a man who is angry with another person who insulted him. Out of anger, he may desire to kill his mocker but does not actually kill the culprit because he knows that if he does he will be imprisoned. With the same thread of reasoning, Plato argues that it is the spirit in man that makes the person angry with his derider, yet his anger is curbed by reason , that is, by the rational soul.”

Hence, again, for Plato, desire, spirit, and reason make up the soul. Desire motivates , spirit animates , and reason guides . And for Plato, if reason can successfully guide desire and spirit, then the human person will attain a well-balanced personality.

If we recall, for Plato, the soul exists prior to the body; hence, the soul is an entity distinct from the body. Now, it is important to note that if we talk about the human person, we talk about the body and soul and that they are inseparable. But this is not the case for Plato. Plato believes that the body and soul are separable. In fact, for Plato, as already mentioned, the human person is just a soul using a body. And Plato believes that the soul is imprisoned in the body and that the soul survives the death of the body because it is immaterial, immutable, and indestructible. This means that for Plato, when the person dies, the body decomposes (because it is material, mutable, and destructible) while the soul leaves the body and goes back to the World of Forms. It must be noted that in Plato’s doctrine of form, there are two kinds of worlds, namely, the World of Forms and the World of Matter. And for Plato, everything comes from the World of Forms and everything that exists (World of Matter) will go back to the World of Forms after it perishes. Again, when the human person dies, the body decomposes and the soul will go back to the World of Forms and lives there eternally. It is here where Aristotle’s notion of the human person as an embodied spirit comes in.

Indeed, Aristotle disagrees with Plato’s dualism which implies the concept of “otherworldliness”. Aristotle believes that there is no dichotomy between the person’s body and soul. The body and soul for Aristotle are in a state of unity. They are inseparable. Hence, unlike Plato, Aristotle believes that we cannot talk about the soul apart from the body and vice versa. Now, how does Aristotle view the human person as an embodied spirit?

First, we need to understand that the term soul is the English translation of the Greek word psyche . And for Aristotle, the general definition of the soul involves the concept of life. Thus, the soul for Aristotle is the principle of life. This suggests, therefore, that anything that has life has a soul.

As the principle of life, the soul causes the body to live; indeed, it is the soul that animates the body. If the soul is the animator of the body, the body acts as the matter to the soul. Hence, Aristotle believes that the soul is the form to the body, while the body is the matter to the soul. For Aristotle, everything that exists is composed of matter and form, and matter and form are indeed inseparable. Hence, we cannot talk about any object if either of these entities is not present. In the context of the human person, Aristotle believes that body and soul are inseparable. Body and soul, therefore, constitute the human person as a whole.

Because for Aristotle anything that has life has a soul, then it follows that plants and animals (in addition to humans) have souls. Thus, Aristotle distinguishes three levels of soul, namely, that of plants, that of animals, and that of humans.

The kind of soul that is found in plants, according to Aristotle, is called vegetative , while those found in animals and humans are called sensitive and rational souls respectively.

According to Aristotle, plants have souls because they possess the three basic requirements for something to be called a “living being”, that is, the capacity to grow, reproduce, and feed itself. However, plants do not share the higher levels of soul; although they grow, reproduce, and feed themselves, plants are not capable of feeling and thinking.

Sensitive souls also grow, reproduce, and feed themselves; but unlike vegetative souls, sensitive souls are capable of sensation. As Aristotle writes:

Plants possess only the nutritive faculty, but other beings possess both it and the sensitive faculty; and if they possess the sensitive faculty, they must also possess the appetitive; for appetite consists of desire, anger, and will. All animals possess at least one sense, that of touch; anything that has a sense is acquainted with pleasure and pain, with what is pleasant and what is painful; and anything that is acquainted with these has desire, since desire is an appetite for pleasant.

Finally, rational souls grow, reproduce, feed themselves, and feel; but unlike the sensitive souls, rational souls are capable of thinking. According to Aristotle, this highest level of soul is present only in humans.

Now, since humans possess all the characteristics of animals, that is, the capacity to grow, reproduce, feed itself, and feel, in addition to being rational, Aristotle concludes that the human person is just an animal that thinks. As Aristotle’s famous dictum on the human person goes, “Man is a rational animal.”

Three Perspectives on the Human Person

If we can get the three views of man in their proper orders and give them their proper weights, we can see that the three views are meant to be complementary and of service to one another. A recovery of an authentic understanding of the true nature of the human person is vital. In fact, the survival of Western Civilization depends upon it.

Lost in the devolution of human learning and knowing are the questions, “Who am I?” “What does it mean to be a human person?” The mind molders are likely to tell you that we are at liberty to create ourselves and you will get a different answer from everyone you ask. But if we can recover the universal truths about being, we will see that there are really only three possible perspectives on the human person in terms of his place in the cosmos: from the materialist standpoint, from the outlook of the human mind, and finally from the vantage point of the human heart. We inevitably incorporate all three at least to some degree because these three perspectives connote the three universal aspects of the human person: the belly, head, and heart. We try in vain to eliminate the head and the heart, but our only real choices concerning them is what weight we give to each one.

The Scientific View of Man

It is a most evident fact that we are physical/material beings. With our five senses we confirm by every second of our existence that we operate materially in this world, hemmed in by the limits of time and space. The scientific view of man considers the human condition in all its purely material phenomena. It reductively assumes that the inductive method of reasoning, aided by the scientific method and interpreted by the five senses, constitutes the “best” way of knowing “real” things. Aristotle pointed out that “all learning begins in the senses,” and there is nothing wrong with beginning with the scientific perspective; it is problematic, however, if we end with it.

There is a madness in this age of progressive thought that would have us believe that, as a result of the rapid technological advancement, we will eventually be able explain all reality by empirical means. The scientific view of man is a usurper in this scientistic age. Notions of God and creation are increasingly considered superstitious. Philosophy has been reduced to material terms, and now even morality is becoming secularized.

Many elements in the scientific view of man are factually correct, but this view comprises a most base understanding of man. Taken by itself, it becomes a deadly reduction of the reality of human existence. It must necessarily see humans as means to be used, not as ends to be loved. It can allow for humans to be manipulated, used, and eliminated if deemed necessary. We are rational creatures, so the scientific view subordinates reason to serve science, not the other way around. We must go beyond the merely material to examine how the gift of our intellect provides insight into the human condition not afforded by the material sciences.

The Philosophical View of Man

To understand man in a philosophical way necessitates a discussion of the proper meanings of the words “person” and “nature.” When talking about human beings, we cannot mention a “nature” without mentioning a “person” connected to it. The first important thing to notice is that it is the person who possesses the nature and not the other way around. Though the pop psychologists would beg to differ, a nature does not possess a person. Nature answers the question of what we are, and person answers the question of who we are. All beings have natures, and when we ask what a being is, we are asking about its nature. However, not every being is a person, but only rational beings are persons. Let us define the person as a being possessed of consciousness, self-awareness, an intellect, and a will. These facts allude to a wide range of intellectual and moral implications nonexistent in beings which are not persons.

Frank Sheed explains in Theology and Sanity that by our natures we discover what we are. “It follows that by our nature we do what we do for every being acts according to what it is.” By these facts we discover another distinction between nature and person. By our natures we do many things: speak, love, sing, and breathe. A dog, by his nature, can do only one of those, and a stone by its nature can do none. So nature is not only what we are, but the source of what we can do. Even though it is by our natures that we see what kinds of things we are capable of doing, it is not our natures that decide to do them; it is the person that decides to do them. As Frank Sheed summarizes “the person is that which does the actions, the nature is that by virtue of which the actions are done, or better, that from which the actions are drawn.”

The philosophical view of man implies that we are moral as well as intellectual beings. It provides the framework to discover the nature of human excellence embodied by the perennial virtues towards which all men of good will tend. The philosophical view of man ought to subsume and guide the scientific view of man for it can anchor the material notions of man in the universal truths about the nature of being. This in turn allows for the discovery of the objective standard concerning virtue and vice available to all human souls who earnestly seek. There is much truth goodness and beauty in this view of man, but it is not the complete view. One may come up short if he stops with a philosophical view of man and ignores the role of the Author of Life.

The Theological View of Man

The fullest and most comprehensive view of man is the theological view. The theological view considers the substance, origin, and end of the human person. It is revealed truth that man is made in the image and likeness of God and at the same time of material. In Genesis 2:7 we learn that “the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” We are made of material but infused with immaterial life and the gifted image of God Himself by way of the intellect and will.

The theological view of man explains his origin in a way opposite that of the scientific view of man–which considers that man evolved by accident,  as a kind of sophisticated ape. The theological view asserts that God created man on purpose with divine intentionality as an ineffable act of love. Man is a creature created by God in His created universe. Every single thing in existence is created by God except God Himself; He is the uncreated Creator.

In learning what we are and about our divine origins, we are compelled to discover the ends of man intended by our Creator. Man, like every other created thing, tends towards its natural end. Since all that God created is good, and man is created good, all created things properly end in giving glory to God. Man’s specific end is intended to be in eternal beatitude. As St. Thomas Aquinas succinctly put it, “to possess God in full in the beatific vision is to have our powers fully realized, fully perfected, and to find them at rest, in perfect happiness for all eternity face to face with God.”

The Three Perspectives Combined

Being made in the image and likeness of God takes into account the fullness of the human person by considering the relationship between the immaterial faculties of the soul and the material realities of physical being. In learning of our substance, origin, and final end, we encounter the empirical realities at the lowest level and the philosophical realities on the ascent to the highest view of man, the Theological. We can discover the truth about these three aspects of the human person and gain invaluable assistance from the philosophical view of man in a support role for understanding the theological view of man. In a similar way, the scientific view of man has the potential to be of service to both the philosophical and the theological view of man if it is properly understood as the servant, not the master.

We desperately need to recover a proper understanding of the human person. As John Henry Cardinal Newman would recommend to us, we ought to “rebuild the Jewish Temple and to plant anew the groves of Academus.” This is to say that we ought to see man in his supernatural glory by the fountainhead of theological truth in Jerusalem and to embrace the heights of natural man emanating from the fountainhead of philosophical truth in Athens. Newman goes on to explain that sacred and profane learning are “dependent on each other, correlative and mutually complementary, how faith operates by means of reason, and reason is directed and corrected by faith.” All this can be confirmed by certain elements of empirical science, but never led by it. If we can get the three views of man in their proper orders and give them their proper weights, we can see that the three views are meant to be complementary and of service to one another. A recovery of an authentic understanding of the true nature of the human person is vital. In fact, the survival of Western Civilization depends upon it.

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The Enlightenment, I believe, will one day be viewed as man’s adolescence. Just as a twenty-something eventually learns that as a teen he had reached a stage where he was able to understand much about the world and arrogantly and embarrassingly concluded that he was wiser than all who had come before him, mankind will one day realize that while the rise of science and industry did enable us to accomplish some great things, it also empowered us to commit some staggeringly idiotic things as well.

When we learn to live like the reformed Scrooge, and live each day in the past, present, and future, we will have reclaimed the wisdom and humility and respect that underlie true humanity.

Beings metaphysically they are the same,, as long as they exist but they are differentiated by the nature of man such as rationality and others.

The Enlightenment, I believe, will one day be viewed as man’s adolescence. Just as a twenty-something eventually learns that as a teen he had reached a stage where he was able to understand much about the world and arrogantly and embarrassingly concluded that he was wiser than all who had come before him, mankind will one day realize that while the rise of science and industry did enable us to accomplish some great things, it also empowered us to commit some staggeringly idiotic things as well.

Jamison, I cannot but agree with you. I believe in the hand of Providence in human history. The salvific work of Christ can never have been in vain. No wonder He tells Sr. Maria Faustina that this is the age of Mercy.

This was a very good essay. It is rare that you see someone able to layout an entire and cultivated “system of thought” about the nature of humanity. Seldom is anything of this nature ever seen. Absolutely brilliant.

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Question of the Month

What is a person, each answer below receives a book. apologies to the entrants not included..

One of the most fundamental questions of anthropology is that of personhood. We might also consider it the starting point for all philosophy. Indeed, it was Martin Heidegger who most forcefully underlined the connection between anthropology and ‘the apprehension of Being’, that is, metaphysics. For him, only the human person might hope to find meaning in the world around them. Hinging on this dilemma of how to define the person are all of the perennial issues of philosophy, of ethics, and of sociology.

To define it succinctly: a person is a being endowed with imagination . A person is able to think abstractly, to project themself into imaginary situations, to plan for the future, and to reflect on the past. In other words, a person acts in the present moment not bound by mere instinct, but usually able to transcend the limits of the animal mind. A person is also inherently social. In order to flourish, a person should exist in communion with other persons, and in sovereignty over its inanimate surroundings. Its faculty of imagination is constructed of accumulated experience, and thereby continually works in relation to the world and to other beings inhabiting it.

This definition covers many possibilities. It seems likely that our Homo erectus ancestors would qualify for personhood. It also seems plausible that future artificial intelligence could hit the mark. Perhaps certain animal species might exist on this spectrum, at the lower scale. But what happens when we pass through the spectrum of personhood onto something greater ? Why should consciousness end with personhood? Might there be other levels of consciousness superior to that which the person enjoys? Such a state would pass beyond both instinct and imagination to something more. Might this be what the Scholastic philosophers termed ‘Perfect Knowledge’? Such knowledge would go beyond instinct and imagination in the way we apprehend them, ignorant as we are. In a certain sense, then, personhood is constrained only by Plato’s cave of illusion, and by our bodily limitations. This might not be a bad thing. It is our cave after all, our world, and our social playground.

Anthony MacIsaac, Institut Catholique de Paris

The question of what a person is, isn’t exclusive to philosophy. Consequently, there are many answers. In a physiological and biological context, a person is a human with certain essential physiological and biological characteristics. Legally, the answer is broader. According to the law, a person is anyone or anything that can initiate and be subject to legal proceedings. By this conception, any adult, corporation, or institution is a person, but a minor is not a person, a foetus is not a person, and a humanoid robot like Hansen Robotics’ ‘Sophia’ is not a person. This highlights that legal personhood is dependent solely on legal recognition. In this sense a legal person is similar to a political person. A political person is anyone who has citizenship. The robot Sophia has been granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia, which demonstrates the contingency of political personhood. Moreover, there is no shortage of people who have had their citizenship stripped, whose political personhood is therefore non-existent.

In philosophy, morally, a being is a person if they’re a moral agent, making moral judgements and taking moral actions. Metaphysically, the set of criteria for personhood include rationality or logical reasoning, consciousness, self-consciousness, use of language, ability to initiate action, moral agency (again) and intelligence. Robot Sophia, a young child, and even an alien may meet sufficient criteria here. Even a foetus would potentially meet the criteria.

In practice, however, only legal and political personhood are of significance, and these are contingent on recognition by political or legal institutions. However, metaphysical and moral personhood provide an intellectual foundation upon which to discuss legal and political personhood. Therefore I suggest that a person in its full sense – both theoretically and practically – is a metaphysical and moral being with legal and political recognition . The latter is sufficient for practical personhood, the former for theoretical personhood, and both are necessary for full personhood.

Diogo Joao Baptista Gomes, Brachtenbach, Luxembourg

The answer is deceptively simple at face value. I am a person. You are a person. Every relative, friend, colleague, and acquaintance in your life is a person. Perhaps then you are tempted to say that a person is a human being. However, ‘human being’ evokes the human animal, whilst ‘person’ is something more esoteric, linked with one’s personality or intelligence, for example.

Boethius agreed. In his Theological Tractates he defined ‘person’ as ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’. Boethius used the etymology of the word to help him to form his definition. I find this interesting because ‘ persona ’ in Greek was a theatrical mask. So is personhood a mere façade? Are we all just animals masquerading as something more? And if we are all lowly beasts with overblown egos, is it possible that other species fit the criteria for personhood better than we do?

John Locke argued that a person is something that ‘can conceive itself as itself’. By that definition, it isn’t just human beings who qualify for personhood – great apes, elephants, and dolphins would qualify too. Philippa Brakes published an article titled ‘Are Orcas non-human persons?’ Orcas are self-aware, intelligent, and emotional beings. Their paralimbic (brain’s emotional) system is highly developed, even when compared to those of humans, and their insula cortex (which is linked to compassion, empathy, self-awareness, and sociability) is the most elaborate in the world.

No doubt some will reject this. Orcas can’t be people . They are infamously brutal killers: they’re even colloquially known as ‘killer whales’. A recent paper by John Totterdell described a coordinated, gruesome orca attack against a blue whale, in which the orcas stripped the creature of its blubber and fed off it whilst the whale was still alive. Surely this can’t be the behaviour of a person? Yet this response ignores the innumerable atrocities committed by human hands.

It scares us to think that other creatures could match, or perhaps exceed, our own intellectual and emotional understanding. But perhaps it is time to broaden our minds beyond the anthropocentric definition of personhood.

Rebecca McHugh, Ellesmere Port, Cheshire

In the first place, to be a person is to be human. Humans are animals, but they are animals who know . All animals can be said to ‘know’ in limited ways, largely defined by their bodies and their physical needs: they recognize what is good for them and they pursue it. This is not to say that we humans are not limited or defined by our physical bodies and needs: indeed we are! Every human person has a body, lives and grows in and as that body. But we can know in a way that extends far beyond the physical. We can abstract and define realities: we do not just see a rabbit and chase it; we know it as a rabbit. I can know myself as myself. We grow in self-knowledge and in knowledge of the world around us. Why ? and What ? are favourite questions. We become aware of the self-evident principles of life. I remember an occasion when I was looking after some small nieces and their even smaller brother. I bought them ice-creams; and because the boy was so small, I offered him half an ice-cream. But no! He was already aware that ‘whole’ is more – and more desireable – than half!

We are aware of and conscious of ‘myself’, but we are also know others as ‘not me’, and in our relationships with others our self-identity, our personality , develops. It is of course possible for the development of personality in a child to be, as it were, smothered by too much attention from already-formed personalities. Ideally, and normally, a child develops as a person as their knowledge of the world grows, relationships flourish, and choices are made and lived. For with knowledge we have free will, just because, unlike the rest of the animal world, our choice is not determined beforehand by the physical – by our bodies. Although the physical necessarily plays a large part in our development, nevertheless, the human, the person, is equipped freely to choose what he or she knows to be good.

Sr. M. Valery Walker OP, Stone, Staffordshire

Perhaps being a person requires some kind of psychological continuity involving memory and self-awareness. Yet, even if Uncle Rob has serious dementia we will continue to treat him as if he is a person. It is as though the term ‘person’ is not really descriptive , more evaluative . We continue to care for him and continue to feel compassion and love for him. Could not one therefore argue that a person is a being that is capable of being an object for care, compassion and love ?

It may be thought that this is irrational and sentimental. After all, we might care for our goldfish but be unconvinced that the goldfish is a person. We might love our teddy bear, which is clearly not a person. But the relationship we have to Uncle Rob is different to those we have to a goldfish or teddy bear. How we treat Uncle Rob is related to our wider vision of human life, including such fundamental factors as the powerful human intimacies that bind us to him, and the suffering and death that comes to all families. Curiously, in this marvellous yet horrendous nexus, Uncle Rob’s lack of cognitive capacity, far from disqualifying him from personhood, becomes one of the facts that reminds us that he is a person. While diminished cognitively, he yet remains an undiminished person . He remains fully the object of the kind of concern we can only direct at persons.

Such a view of persons partly explains our discomfort at regarding computers as persons, despite their cognitive capacities. Even a figure as complex as the Terminator does not strike us as fully a person. We feel that we are dealing rather with a cognitively sophisticated other . This also reflects the fact that the term person , because it is partly evaluative, does not pick out a metaphysical category, but expresses a relationship of concern we have for certain beings.

Robert Griffiths, Enton, Godalming

In a rush to bring order to the perceptual chaos that is our environment, the human brain tends to use rules of thumb, which, by their very nature, promote generalization based on information from prior experiences. In a way, the brain is constantly playing connect-the-dots by making predictions about how the dots are supposed to be connected. Personhood, in essence, is a cognitive construct – a mental picture of an individual drawn by connecting the dots, which are the perceptual features or physical characteristics of the individual. Unlike ‘human’ – a concept grounded in the biological reality of neurons, tissues, and bones – a ‘person’ exists purely within the mind, and thereby is influenced by cognitive schemas of one’s own or with whom one interacts.

This view implies that you can play host to multiple persons, where you are at least partially in control of the kind of person you are, constantly changing and modifying it in response to feedback from your surroundings. That, in turn, affects others’ perception of you, and elicits a similar feedback loop within them, which then changes your surroundings again. You connect the dots of your personhood in a particular way based on your beliefs, while others do it per their own beliefs. The resulting pictures are quite different. Making things even more chaotic, the constant back-and-forth between individuals and their surroundings means the dots keep moving while the lines are being drawn.

We can see evidence for this view of personhood in colloquialisms like ‘He became a completely different person’ or ‘You’re not the same person I fell in love with’. Interestingly, such sentiments are usually not observed when an individual changes their gender or radically alters their features through surgical means. That again suggests that a person is not a physical object but a mental concept, an effort by our brains to construct coherent narratives from the multiplicity of sensory experiences. An individual is a lot like a complex number. The equivalent of the real part is the physical, mechanical structure of a body, while anchored to it is a mental part that contributes to the behaviour and nature of the whole. That mental part is the person.

Rudradeep Guha, Vadodara, India

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin’, thought Alice;’but a grin without a cat! It is the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The inner world of the human being is surprisingly similar to the grin of the Cheshire Cat: the ‘psyche’ (consciousness, perception, needs and motives) seem to be there, but the ‘owner’ is not visible. To see the owner behind the grin is to answer the question ‘What is a person?’

We are each ultimately unknowable to other people, but we also need other people to come to know ourselves. We are dependent on the perceptions of people outside ourselves. According to the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), another person can be revealed only in a dialogue, in the process of mutual understanding in which “the activity of the knower is combined with the activity of the discoverer.” A person then is the mutual co-existence of ‘I’ and the ‘other’ and as such cannot be an ‘object of study’: it can only become a subject in a dialogue, for whom the other is not ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘I’, but a completely developed ‘you’. Therefore, the self is not an individual psychological phenomenon, but a decentred, dynamic and permeable social entity in which consciousness is not the property of the individual but a shared social phenomenon. Consciousness is always a product of responsive interactions, and cannot exist in isolation. Even hermits are still in dialogue, with their ecological surroundings, or with multiple inner voices.

Bakhtin noted that a person has no internal sovereign territory, but is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another with the eyes of another. So the ‘owner’ behind the grin is a being for another and through the other, for oneself.

Nella Leontieva, Sydney, N.S.W.

Person’ is an important word. Since a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on abortion, Americans have bitterly argued whether a baby in the womb is a person. If it is, it has moral and legal rights, such as the right to life, and thus it shouldn’t be killed. Note that I said ‘baby in the womb’ and ‘killed’. Those favoring unrestricted abortions would replace ‘baby’ with ‘fetus’, which is a mass of cells that can be aborted instead of ‘killed’. Words matter. However, whatever terms you use, the issue is the same: ‘Is the baby/fetus growing in the womb a person?’

Is the issue a metaphysical one or a moral one? One of being, or one of status in the moral order? At first it seems to be the former, but I believe it is the latter. The biology is comparatively straightforward; everyone can agree on the biological situation, but not whether it is a person. The real issue is, ‘What rights (moral and legal) shall we say that the baby/fetus has?’

It would be wonderful if we could definitely say what a person is so that all the world would agree. But we cannot. Attributes commonly describing a person are consciousness, self-awareness and personal identity, individuality, rationality, feelings (pain and pleasure, love and hatred, fear of death, etc), ability to choose (free will), set long term goals, and experience humor and beauty. I am inclined to think all of these attributes are necessary to the concept of personhood. Unfortunately, each of these attributes seems to allow gradation. Also, the marginal cases, such as newborn babies and comatose individuals on life support systems, lack one or more of the ‘required’ attributes. These considerations imply a scale of personhood. This is disturbing, for in the past such thinking has justified oppression and slavery. Most of us demand that a newborn baby and the comatose patient be considered persons, because we care for them as persons. Our pets have feelings and we have feelings for them, and so in some respects they deserve that we treat them as persons. And we do, but not fully so. As for aliens and robots, I think they can wait until we have a better grasp of the issue here and now.

John Talley, Rutherfordton, NC

Who am I? The crying child asked the father. When am I? The heart beseeched the absent lover. Why am I? Existence sighed under the sullen sky. Where am I? The mind questioned the tired body. What am I? The man whispered unto himself.

“You are stars stirred with consciousness” The mirror whispered to the man. “You dwell in purpose, promise, dream and future plan” The body told the broken mind. “You are nothing beyond the will to be” As the spinning heavens rained its light on me. “You bleed when nothing else matters” The lover nursed her broken heart. “For you are a window, a forest, a reason, a door, Life’s memory of what came before, Because you are a person” The father held the crying child. “Man unbeknownst to himself Being unreconciled Nothing less, my love, And nothing forevermore.”

Bianca Laleh, Totnes, Devon

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Human persons and human dignity: implications for dialogue and action.

By: Thomas Banchoff

August 19, 2013

" Contending Modernities ," August 19, 2013

What is the human person? As human beings, we are biological as well as social creatures; we inhabit both physical and cultural space. What distinguishes us as persons , and not just as organisms, is a culture of human dignity – the shared idea that, as human beings, we are entitled to respect and recognition from one another.

Where does the dignity of the human person come from? Broadly speaking, one can distinguish secular-scientific and religious foundations.

From a secular and scientific angle, we have dignity and should respect and recognize one another because of our common humanity. Some emphasize our shared capacity for independent thought; in line with Immanuel Kant, they see autonomy and rationality as a foundation for human dignity. Others focus more on our ability to identify and sympathize with others, an approach related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of “pitié” and Adam Smith’s “moral sentiments.”

Recent advances in evolutionary biology and neuroscience have deepened our understanding of this latter, relational approach to the foundations of human dignity. In the long run, evolution appears to have favored the development of ecological sensitivity, group identification and solidarity, and cooperation in the acquisition and shared use of resources. In the here and now, new developments in neuroscience suggest that our brains are much more than autonomous information processors; they change and grow through our interactions and relationships with others and with our external environments.

Interestingly, scientific methods that do not begin with the concept of human dignity are increasingly leading to a conclusion compatible with it — that we have good evolutionary and biological reasons to acknowledge one another as fellow human beings worthy of respect and recognition and therefore endowed with an intrinsic dignity.

For Catholicism and Islam, the focus of the Contending Modernities project , the dignity of the human person has divine foundations. Because God created each of us and cares for each of us, each individual person has an intrinsic and inviolable dignity. The moral theology of the person is most developed in Christianity; it is connected with the mystery of the Trinity (one God in three persons), and in the Incarnation (God becoming a human being.) But the idea of the person, as a creature of an all powerful and merciful God, also plays an important role in Islam. God reveals his law to humankind and calls us to live as His co-regents on earth, honoring one another with recognition and respect.

There is, of course, a fundamental asymmetry between the secular-scientific and the religious understandings of the human person. The non-believer will reject the idea that the dignity of the human person has divine origins, while the believer will typically assert that human dignity has both divine and natural foundations.

Yet this asymmetry need not be a barrier to dialogue. In our contemporary era, even those who reject the idea of human dignity as fuzzy and unscientific generally affirm the importance of according basic respect and recognition to all human beings. The basic idea of the human person and of universal human dignity is shared, even as terminology differs. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emerged out of decades of contestation within and across secular and religious traditions – and in revulsion against the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust – remains the clearest and most powerful expression of this far-reaching consensus.

In practice we know that this broad contemporary convergence around the idea of the human person and human dignity, across the secular-religious divide, coexists with fierce disagreement on a range of ethical and policy questions. Is the human embryo or fetus a human person deserving of protection? Are primates or other non-human animals to be considered persons with intrinsic dignity or rights? Should governments work to secure equality of opportunity for their citizens and provide a minimum standard of living for all? Should governments and citizens share their wealth with those in need outside, as well as inside, a nation’s borders? Questions relating to the human person and human dignity can be multiplied across economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy domains (even if, in the United States, they tend to center on bioethics).

A key challenge in such ethical and policy debates, within and across secular-scientific and religious communities, is to keep the ideas of the human person and of human dignity in the foreground. That means asking what is at stake for particular people and their livelihoods in particular contexts, as well as thinking through the ethical implications of our individual and collective decisions for global humanity, at a time when the rapid advance of technology and of globalization in all its dimensions is rendering those decisions more complex and consequential.

A focus on the human person has a further implication, perhaps the most challenging of all – that in all these ethical and policy controversies, we should acknowledge the humanity and dignity of our interlocutors, no matter how much we may disagree.

This article was originally published on the University of Notre Dame blog " Contending Modernities ."

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Locke on Personal Identity

John Locke (1632–1704) added the chapter in which he treats persons and their persistence conditions (Book 2, Chapter 27) to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1694, only after being encouraged to do so by William Molyneux (1692–1693). [ 1 ] Nevertheless, Locke’s treatment of personal identity is one of the most discussed and debated aspects of his corpus. Locke’s discussion of persons received much attention from his contemporaries, ignited a heated debate over personal identity, and continues to influence and inform the debate over persons and their persistence conditions. This entry aims to first get clear on the basics of Locke’s position, when it comes to persons and personal identity, before turning to areas of the text that continue to be debated by historians of philosophy working to make sense of Locke’s picture of persons today. It then canvases how Locke’s discussion of persons was received by his contemporaries, and concludes by briefly addressing how those working in metaphysics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have responded to Locke’s view—giving the reader a glimpse of Locke’s lasting impact and influence on the debate over personal identity.

1. Locke on Persons and Personal Identity: The Basics

2. locke on persons: what’s up for debate, 3. the early modern reception of locke’s picture of persons, 4. locke’s lasting impact on the personal identity debate, primary literature by locke, other historical literature, contemporary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Locke’s most thorough discussion of the persistence (or diachronic identity) of persons can be found in Book 2, Chapter 27 of the Essay (“Of Identity and Diversity”), though Locke anticipates this discussion as early as Book 1, Chapter 4, Section 5, and Locke refers to persons in other texts, including the Second Treatise of Government . The discussion of persons and their persistence conditions also features prominently in Locke’s lengthy exchange with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1697–1699).

Locke begins “Of Identity and Diversity” by first getting clear on the principle of individuation, and by setting out what some have called the place-time-kind principle—which stipulates that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time, and no individual can be in two different places at the same time (L-N 2.27.1). [ 2 ] With some of the basics of identity in place, Locke posits that before we can determine the persistence conditions for atoms, masses of matter, plants, animals, men, or persons, we must first know what we mean by these terms. In other words, before we can determine what makes atoms, masses of matter, plants, animals, men, or persons the same over time, we must pin down the nominal essences—or general ideas—for these kinds. Of this Locke says,

’Tis not therefore Unity of Substance that comprehends all sorts of Identity , or will determine it in every Case: But to conceive, and judge of it aright, we must consider what Idea the Word it is applied to stands for…. (L-N 2.27.7)

That we must define a kind term before determining the persistence conditions for that kind is underscored in Locke’s definition of “person”. Locke starts off by saying,

This being premised to find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what Person stands for….

He goes on,

which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places…. (L-N 2.27.9)

A person for Locke is thus the kind of entity that can think self reflectively, and think of itself as persisting over time.

Locke additionally asserts that persons are agents. For Locke “person” is a

…Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. (L-N 2.27.26)

Persons are therefore not just thinking intelligent beings that can reason and reflect, and consider themselves as the same thinking things in different times and places, but also entities that can be held accountable for their actions. It is because persons can think of themselves as persisting over time that they can, and do, plan ahead, with an eye toward the punishment or reward that may follow.

Just after Locke defines “person”, he begins to elucidate what makes any person the same person over time. He asserts that

…consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self . (L-N 2.27.9)

Consciousness is what distinguishes selves, and thus,

…in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person ; it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done. (L-N 2.27.9)

After the initial assertion that the diachronic identity of persons consists in sameness of consciousness, Locke goes on to use various imaginary cases to drive this point home.

The imaginary cases that Locke employs are not dissimilar to ancient cases, such as the Ship of Theseus, reported by Plutarch. In this case, we are asked to imagine a ship that has slowly had its planks replaced with new ones. The intuition Plutarch’s case is intended to test is whether, at the end (when the ship has an entirely new material constitution), we have the same ship as before. Likewise, Locke is using cases to test readers’ intuitions about persistence and identity. But it is arguable that Locke is the first to devise such cases to specifically test readers’ intuitions about persons and the conditions under which they are the same. Locke is thus carving out a new conceptual space through such imaginary cases. A few of these will be outlined and discussed in what follows.

In the “prince and the cobbler” passage, or L-N 2.27.15, Locke asks the reader to imagine the soul of a prince entering and informing the body of a cobbler, taking all of its “princely thoughts” with it. In this scenario, the person called “prince” ends up persisting in the man identified as the “cobbler”, because the prince’s consciousness goes along with the prince’s soul. Just after Locke describes this scenario, he says,

I know that in the ordinary way of speaking, the same Person, and the same Man, stand for one and the same thing. And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak, as he pleases, and to apply what articulate Sounds to what Ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases. But yet when we will enquire, what makes the same Spirit, Man , or Person , in our Minds; and having resolved with our selves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine, in either of them, or the like, when it is the same , and when not. (L-N 2.27.15)

Through the “prince and the cobbler” passage it not only becomes clear that a person goes where their consciousness goes, but also that Locke distinguishes between the term “man” (which is synonymous with “human being”) and “person”.

Other scenarios that Locke conjures, such as the “waking and sleeping Socrates” case (L-N 2.27.19), make clear that even if an individual remains the same man, he may not persist as the same person. Here Locke says,

If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness , Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen. (L-N 2.27.19)

If Socrates has a different consciousness by day than he does by night, then waking Socrates ought not be punished for what sleeping Socrates does. This is because although Socrates is the same man by day as he is by night, he is a different person by day than he is at night (and moral responsibility lies with persons, according to Locke). Thus while the identity of consciousness determines the identity of person, the identity of persons and the identity of men come apart for Locke—or at least they can . [ 3 ]

Locke additionally distinguishes between persons and souls. There is evidence for this in L-N 2.27.13. Here Locke claims,

But yet to return to the Question before us, it must be allowed, That if the same consciousness … can be transferr’d from one thinking Substance to another, it will be possible, that two thinking Substances may make but one Person.

If consciousness can actually be transferred from one soul to another, then a person can persist, despite a change in the soul to which her consciousness is annexed. Thus if a reader’s soul switches out as she progresses from the start of L-N 2.27 to the end, so long as the reader’s consciousness remains the same, she remains the same person, according to Locke.

On top of this, Locke asserts that even if an individual has the same soul, he may fail to be the same person. Locke makes this point in L-N 2.27.14, 23, and 24. In the “day and night-man” passage, or 2.27.23, Locke asks the reader to imagine “…two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same Body, the one constantly by Day, the other by Night” (L-N 2.27.23). Locke goes on to suggest that the “… Day and the Night-man ” are “as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato ” (L-N 2.27.23). Locke then makes clear that this is the case even if day and night-man share the same soul:

For granting that the thinking Substance in Man must be necessarily suppos’d immaterial, ‘tis evident, that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again, as appears in the forgetfulness Men often have of their past Actions, and the Mind many times recovers the memory of a past consciousness, which it had lost for twenty Years together. Make these intervals of Memory and Forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by Day and Night, and you have two Persons with the same immaterial Spirit, as much as in the former instance two Persons with the same Body. So that self is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance…but only by identity of consciousness. (L-N 2.27.23)

Just as the “waking and sleeping Socrates” passage, L-N 2.27.23 shows that there can be a change of person due to a change in consciousness, and this is the case even though there is no change in man. But, what Locke also makes clear through L-N 2.27.23 is that there can be a change of person even though there is no change in soul. Thus while many philosophers (including Plato, Rene Descartes, Samuel Clarke, etc.) think that one cannot be a person unless one has an immaterial soul, and the identity of persons rests in the identity of souls, Locke makes the bold move of pulling persons and souls apart.

In addition to this, Locke calls the substantial nature of souls into question. Locke takes thought to be immaterial, and while Locke contends that the immaterial cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the material, Locke is not committed to substance dualism, when it comes to finite thinkers. This is because Locke thinks substratum—or the substance that underlies and supports any particular substance’s qualities—is impossible for finite minds to penetrate. Additionally there is nothing in the concepts “thought” and “matter” that allows us to deduce that one excludes the other, and God could have superadded the ability to think to formerly inert systems of matter. In Locke’s picture, we cannot know whether the substance (or substratum) that underlies thinking and willing is different from the substance (or substratum) that underlies being solid and white, or yellow and malleable. Locke’s official position on the substantial nature of finite thinkers is therefore one of agnosticism.

This section outlines some of the areas of Locke’s text, and aspects of Locke’s view, that continue to be debated by historians of philosophy working to make sense of Locke’s picture of persons and their persistence conditions today. As will soon become clear, there is disagreement about almost every aspect of Locke’s discussion of persons, and even some of what has been presented thus far betrays a particular interpretive framework.

One of the overarching questions asked about Locke’s Essay is how much it includes metaphysical exploration. Some think that Locke’s project is exclusively epistemological, citing (among other passages) the following as evidence for their view: In the Epistle to the Reader , Locke describes himself as an “underlabourer”. Locke then goes on to say,

This, therefore being my Purpose to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent; I shall not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind; or trouble my self to examine, wherein its Essence consists, or by what Motions of our Spirits, or Alterations of our Bodies, we come to have any Sensation by our Organs, or any Ideas in our Understandings; and whether those Ideas do in their Formation, any, or all of them, depend on Matter, or no. These are Speculations, which, however curious and entertaining, I shall decline, as lying out of my Way, in the Design I am now upon. (L-N 1.1.2)

Under this reading, Locke is interested in determining what we can and cannot know by first determining how we come to have ideas, but what this entails is determining which activities give rise to our ideas, rather than investigating the metaphysical nature of the thinking thing wherein these activities—sensation and reflection—take place. Likewise all other explorations within the Essay eschew metaphysics.

Those who read L-N 2.27 as part of a project which is purely epistemological see the claims that Locke makes about the persistence of persons as claims about what we can know about the persistence of persons. As Lex Newman puts it,

Locke’s broader aim is to clarify the conditions under which we judge that we are numerically the same with some earlier person, not the conditions under which we strictly are the same person. (2015: 90)

Under this kind of reading, Locke’s claim that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance (L-N 2.27.10 and 23) amounts to the claim that if any person wants to determine whether they are the same, they do not look to substance to find out. The idea is that because we have such an impoverished notion of substance in general, we do not look to substratum to determine if we are the same person over time in Locke’s view.

Other scholars tend to think that although Locke sets his task in the Essay as an epistemological one, he cannot help but dabble in some metaphysics along the way. What has been presented (regarding the basics of Locke’s picture of persons) in this entry thus far falls within this interpretive camp. This is why the imaginary cases that Locke employs in L-N 2.27 have been described as giving the reader information about what makes it the case that a person is the same at time 2 as at time 1. According to this view, what Locke is giving us in L-N 2.27 are inter alia “the conditions under which we strictly are the same person”.

Nevertheless, within the interpretive camp that takes Locke to dabble in metaphysics, there is widespread debate, both at the macro and the micro level. To start with the macro level: Some who fall into this camp see Locke making metaphysical claims in various passages throughout the text . Such scholars thus see what Locke is doing in L-N 2.27 as very much in keeping with moves that he makes in other parts of the Essay (see Stuart 2013, for example). However, others see L-N 2.27—and the metaphysics Locke is doing therein—as a significant break from the methodology that Locke employs in the rest of the Essay . This is because just after Locke claims that his project in the Essay is an epistemological one (1.1.2), he makes clear that in this project, he is using the historical plain method, or roughly, the Baconian method of induction (see Nuovo forthcoming). Of this, Locke says,

…I shall imagine I have not wholly misimploy’d my self in the Thoughts I shall have on this Occasion, if, in this Historical, plain Method, I can give any Account of the Ways , whereby our Understandings come to attain those Notions of Things we have, and can set down any Measures of the Certainty of our Knowledge, or the Grounds of those perswasions, which are to be found amongst Men, so various, different, and wholly contradictory…. (L-N 1.1.2)

Those who see a tension between Locke’s discussion of personal identity and the rest of the Essay contend that the way in which Locke proceeds in L-N 2.27 not only includes metaphysics, but also a reliance on thought experiments for data. Thus, rather than surveying a number of instances, and drawing inferences from there—or utilizing the historical, plain method—as he claims to be doing throughout the Essay , Locke is doing something quite different in 2.27: He is employing imaginary cases instead (see Antonia LoLordo 2012, for example).

However, what the historical plain method amounts to for Locke, and whether Locke’s use of thought experiments in L-N 2.27 is in tension with this method is also the subject of debate. So too is whether Locke uses thought experiments in 2.27 alone . Additionally, some have questioned whether the exercises that Locke walks readers through in 2.27 count as thought experiments at all (see Kathryn Tabb 2018, for more on this). There are thus wide-ranging debates about how to best describe 2.27 and the methodologies Locke employs therein. There is also much disagreement regarding how to square these methodologies with the general description Locke gives of his project in the Essay . Moreover, this is the case even amongst those who are in agreement that Locke is doing metaphysics in 2.27.

On top of this, there are deep and long-standing micro-level debates amongst those who think Locke is giving us some metaphysics in L-N 2.27. One such debate regards the implications of Locke’s assertion that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance (2.27.10 and 23). Some scholars take Locke’s assertion that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance, and other similar claims, to be evidence that Locke is a relativist about identity (see Stuart 2013, for example). To get a sense of what this entails, it is helpful to consider the contrast case: strict identity. If a philosopher holds a strict identity theory, then she takes it that we can ask, “Is y at time 2 the same as x at time 1?” and arrive at a determinate answer. On the other hand, if a philosopher is a relativist about identity, then she asserts that in response to the former question, we have to ask “Same what?” So if we ask, “Is Socrates the same?” a relativist about identity thinks we have to specify under which sortal term we are considering Socrates. Are we thinking about Socrates as a human being, or a body, or a soul (or something else altogether)?

On top of this, the relativist about identity thinks that an entity who is of two sorts can persist according to one, while failing to persist according to the other. We might say that from one day to the next, Socrates persists as the same human being, but not as the same body. Thus when Locke says that a person can persist despite a change in substance, or a person can persist despite a change in soul, some scholars take Locke to be showing that he is a relativist about identity. Relative identity readings were rather unpopular for some time, but have experienced a resurgence as of late (see Stuart 2013).

Still, some think that attributing this kind of reading to Locke is anachronistic. Others take issue with the fact that under a relative identity reading, there is, properly speaking, just one entity described under different sorts. (What we call “Socrates” does not pick out a human being, and person, with a body and soul, but rather one thing, described in these different ways.) This is appealing for some, especially those who think that this is the only way to save Locke from violating the place-time-kind principle, which stipulates that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time. But it lacks appeal for those who take Locke to be claiming that persons and the human beings who house them (for instance) are distinct. [ 4 ]

Some scholars take Locke’s assertion that the identity of substance is neither required nor enough for the persistence of any person to be evidence that persons are modes (or attributes), rather than substances (or things themselves). Such scholars then turn to Locke’s place-time-kind principle, for further evidence for their view. They take Locke’s assertion that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time to mean that no two substances of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time. Souls are thinking substances for Locke, and if persons are substances, they would count as such. Thus, persons cannot be substances, for otherwise wherever there is a person and her soul there are two thinking substances in the same place at the same time. Those who offer mode readings additionally turn to Locke’s claim that person is a “forensic term” and Locke’s bold assertion that a demonstrative science of morality is possible as evidence that the term “person” must be a mode term, rather than a substance term. This line of interpretation is popular today (see LoLordo 2012, Mattern 1980, Uzgalis 1990), but dates back to Edmund Law (1769).

Other Locke scholars defend substance readings of Locke on persons. They turn to Locke’s claims about substance, power, and agency, to conclude that if an entity has any power whatsoever it has to be a substance. Persons have powers. Thus, persons have to be substances for Locke (for arguments along these lines, see Gordon-Roth 2015, Rickless 2015, Chappell 1990). They then have to explain what Locke means when he asserts that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance. Those who do not take the relative identity path usually end up working to get clear on what Locke could mean by “substance” when he makes this claim. Many conclude that what Locke means is that the identity of any person does not depend upon the identity of the simple substances that compose or constitute her. There are numerous defenders of this position today (see Alston and Bennett 1988, Bolton 1994, Chappell 1990, and Uzgalis 1990). Thus questions about two of the most basic features of Locke’s picture of personal identity—What is Locke’s (general) view on identity?; and, What kind of entity is a person, exactly?—are the subject of ongoing debate. [ 5 ]

So too are the most clearly stated aspects of Locke’s view: the claim that persons have consciousnesses, and the accompanying assertion that sameness of person rests in sameness of consciousness. What is consciousness for Locke? What does Locke mean by “sameness of consciousness”? Answering these questions turns out to be difficult, since Locke does not say much about what he takes consciousness to be (and we only know the persistence conditions of any entity, once we get clear on the nominal essence of that entity’s kind, according to Locke). Nevertheless, answering these questions is crucial to understanding Locke’s theory of personal identity since it is consciousness centered.

Some scholars take Locke to be a strict memory theorist. In other words, consciousness just is memory for Locke. As will become clear below, this reading dates back at least as far as Thomas Reid. Of course, it is the case that the way a person extends their consciousness backward is via memory. It thus may seem as if the identity of consciousness consists in memory, or that to have the same consciousness as she who did x , one has to have a memory of doing x , under Locke’s view. Nevertheless, as Margaret Atherton points out, Locke talks at length about forgetfulness, and if consciousness just is memory, then we cannot make sense of consciousness at any given moment where a person is not invoking memory (1983: 277–278). Atherton then goes on to develop an account of consciousness that is analogous with Locke’s conception of animal “life”.

The identity of consciousness is what allows for the persistence of any person, just as the identity of life is what allows for the persistence of any animal. “If we look at Locke in this fashion”, Atherton argues,

then what he is saying is that what makes me different at this moment from any other person is that my thoughts are identical with my consciousness of them. No one else can have my consciousness any more than any organism can have my life. (Atherton 1983: 283)

A person, in Atherton’s reading of Locke, is a single center of consciousness, and so long as that single center of consciousness persists, the person persists.

Other scholars hold what is called an “appropriation reading” (see Winkler 1991, Thiel 2011, LoLordo 2012). Under this reading, what Locke means when he says that sameness of person consists in sameness of consciousness, is that any person extends back only to those mental events or acts which they take to be their own . In other words, the persistence of any person or self is best seen in terms of the “subjective constitution of the self” (Winkler 1991: 204). There might be a worry that under this kind of reading, Locke gives persons too much authority. That is, a person could deny that she is the one who committed the crime, just because she doesn’t see that act as her own. But, although the “self has a certain authority over its own constitution”, Kenneth Winkler makes clear that

it is important to realize that this authority is not consciously exerted. I do not willfully disown one act and appropriate another; instead I accept what my consciousness reveals to me. There is also a severe limit on that authority, imposed by the transitivity of identity,

which comes through, as Winkler notes, in Reid’s objection—an objection which Winkler thinks sympathetic readers of Locke can answer and which is discussed in section 3 below (Winkler 1991: 206).

From these treatments it is still difficult to discern what consciousness is for Locke, however. Shelley Weinberg works to give a robust picture of Locke’s conception of consciousness in her recent book (2016). According to Weinberg, Locke uses the term “consciousness” in two different ways:

…Locke seems to see consciousness as (1) a mental state inseparable from an act of perception by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving , and (2) the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states . (Weinberg 2016: 153)

The former is a momentary psychological state that allows for what Weinberg calls

a momentary subjective experience that the self presently perceiving is the same as the self that remembers having once had a past thought or action

and captures the first-person experience of persisting over time (Weinberg 2016: 153). The latter is an “objective fact of an ongoing consciousness” (Weinberg 2016: 153). This sense of consciousness is available from a third personal point of view, and fills in the gaps that any person’s subjective experience might entail.

Thus, Weinberg contends that the identity, or continued existence, of consciousness consists in a metaphysical fact, rather than appropriation. Nevertheless, Weinberg additionally argues that the first personal (conscious) experience of our own mental states, whether those states are occurrent sensations, reflections, or via remembering is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of personal identity. In other words, to have the awareness (or knowledge) of an ongoing self—or (2)—we must have (1). Although there is a range of interpretations of Locke on consciousness on the table, Weinberg’s book, Consciousness in Locke , marks the first large-scale treatment of Locke’s views on consciousness. [ 6 ]

In addition to the debate over what consciousness is, and what Locke means when he says that the identity of any person consists in the identity of consciousness, there is ongoing debate about what Locke’s stance is when it comes to what can give rise to consciousness. That is, there is ongoing discussion of what Locke means when he says that God could have superadded thinking to formerly inert systems of matter, and what Locke’s actual position is on the substantial nature of finite thinkers. There are those who take Locke to be truly agnostic. Those who take this line of interpretation remind readers of Locke’s stated aims at the start of the Essay (as quoted earlier), and the epistemic modesty that Locke maintains throughout the text. But, there are others who think that Locke overstates the probability that souls are immaterial substances, so as not to ruffle the feathers of Stillingfleet and other religious authorities. Some in the latter group think that Locke leans toward materialism. This raises questions about how far Anthony Collins (discussed below) departs from the Lockean picture, or the degree to which Locke anticipates later materialist pictures of persons. [ 7 ] At the very least, it can be said that Locke challenges the importance that many philosophers place on the immaterial soul to personhood and personal identity. [ 8 ] As might be expected, this was met with mixed reviews.

This section addresses how Locke’s view was received by his contemporaries and by those writing in the remainder of the early modern period (16 th -18 th centuries). A good number of philosophers vehemently objected to Locke’s treatment of persons, though some defended it, and many others used it as an inspiration, or springboard, for their own views.

Many who objected to Locke’s treatment of persons did so because they objected to the decreased importance Locke places on the soul for personhood and personal persistence (see Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid, and Samuel Clarke, for example). Many such philosophers argue that numerical identity consists in no change at all , and the only kind of entity that allows for identity in this strict sense is an immaterial substance.

Along the way, some charged Locke’s theory of personal identity with circularity. As Joseph Butler puts it,

…[O]ne should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes. (1736 [1842: 298])

Butler then asserts that Locke’s misstep stems from his methodology. He says,

This wonderful mistake may possibly have arisen from hence; that to be endued with consciousness is inseparable from the idea of a person, or intelligent being. For this might be expressed inaccurately thus, that consciousness makes personality: and from hence it might be concluded to make personal identity. (1736 [1842: 298])

One of the points that Locke emphasizes—that persistence conditions are determined via defining kind terms—is what, according to Butler, leads Locke astray.

Butler additionally makes the point that memory is not required for personal persistence. He says,

But though present consciousness of what we at present do and feel is necessary to our being the persons we now are; yet present consciousness of past actions or feelings is not necessary to our being the same persons who performed those actions, or had those feelings. (1736 [1842: 298])

This is a point that others develop when they assert that Locke’s view results in contradiction.

The most popular, or well known, version of this line of objection comes from Thomas Reid (1785). In the “brave officer” objection, Reid poses the following challenge to Locke’s theory of personal identity. He says:

Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging. These things being supposed, it follows, from Mr. Locke’s doctrine, that he who was flogged at school is the same person who took the standard, and that he who took the standard is the same person who was made a general. Whence it follows, if there be any truth in logic, that the general is the same person with him who was flogged at school. But the general’s consciousness does not reach so far back as his flogging; therefore, according to Mr. Locke’s doctrine, he is not the person who was flogged. Therefore, the general is, and at the same time is not, the same person with him who was flogged at school. (Reid 1785 [1851: 248–249])

In this exercise (and other similar versions of it) we are supposed to assume Locke’s theory of personal identity, and maintain that sameness of person consists in sameness of consciousness. When we do, Reid expects we will conclude that the general (C) is the same person as he who took the standard from the enemy (B) because the general (C) remembers doing so. Additionally he who took the standard from the enemy (B) is the same person as he who was flogged at school for robbing the orchard (A) because he (B) remembers that past traumatic experience. Thus C (he who is was made general) is identical to B (he who took the standard) and B (he who took the standard) is identical to A (he who was flogged at school).

Given the law of transitivity (which says that if C is identical to B and B is identical to A, then C is identical to A), we should conclude that C (the general) is identical to A (the flogged school boy). But, since we are assuming Locke’s theory of personal identity, Reid thinks we cannot come to this conclusion. If we assume Locke’s view, Reid contends that we have to conclude that C (the general) is not identical to A (the school boy). This is because C (the general) has no consciousness or memory of having been flogged at school (A).

This and other similar objections are meant to show that if we place the identity of persons in the identity of consciousness, as Locke suggests, then we run into a problem—namely one of contradiction—for we get the result that C and A both are, and are not, identical. Nevertheless, as is made clear above, there is debate about whether Locke’s claims about identity of consciousness should be read in terms of memory, and whether Reid is correct to take “memory” and “consciousness” as synonymous terms for Locke.

Circularity and contradiction are just two of the major objections launched at Locke’s theory of personal identity shortly after it is published. Importantly, these are objections to which sympathetic readers of Locke are still responding (see Atherton 1983, Weinberg 2016, LoLordo 2012, Thiel 2011, Garrett 2003, Schechtman 2014, etc). This gives the reader a glimpse of some of the lines of attack that were launched against Locke’s discussion of persons during the early modern period. Nevertheless, not all of Locke’s peers attacked his picture of persons, and numerous philosophers worked to defend his view.

One such philosopher is Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Cockburn pens her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding in 1702. [ 9 ] In this text, Cockburn is responding to three pamphlets directed at Locke’s Essay . [ 10 ] These pamphlets take aim at Locke’s Essay rather broadly, and Cockburn’s Defence reflects this, but much is said about Locke on persons and their persistence conditions therein. Specifically, these pamphlets charge Locke with not proving that the soul is immortal, or threatening proofs of the immortality of the soul. They additionally charge that Locke’s view leaves us with the strange consequence that our souls are in constant flux, making it the case that we “awake with new souls each morning”. Given the importance of the soul, its persistence, and its immortality, to many traditional theories of personal identity, these objections are arguably intended to be objections to Locke’s picture of persons. Cockburn is quick to defend Locke, but proceeds carefully and thoroughly as she does so.

Cockburn points out that Locke never sets out to prove the soul immortal, and Locke actually claims that it is more probable that the soul is immaterial, than material. Moreover, even if Locke is not committed to the soul being immaterial, this ought not threaten proofs of the immortality of the soul. This is because what allows Locke to speculate that God could have superadded thinking to formerly inert systems of matter is that God is omnipotent, and surely an omnipotent being could make souls immortal even if they are material. Moreover, proofs for the immortality of the soul that rely on the immateriality of the soul are not likely to convince laymen of the soul’s immortality, and may actually leave them sceptical about whether the soul is indeed immortal (even if it is immaterial).

Cockburn additionally attacks the assertion that Locke’s claim that “men think not always” threatens proofs of the immortality of the soul. Of this she says,

But let it be granted, that it is ever so clearly proved, that thinking is necessary to the soul’s existence, that can no more prove, that it shall always exist, than it proves, that it has always existed; it being as possible for that omnipotence, which from nothing gave the soul a being , to deprive it of that being in the midst of its most vigorous reflections, as in an utter suspension of all thought. If then this proposition, that the soul always thinks , does not prove, that it is immortal, the contrary supposition takes not away any proof of it; for it is no less easy to conceive, that a being, which has the power of thinking with some intervals of cessation from thought, that has existed here for some time in a capacity of happiness or misery, may be continued in, or restored to the same state, in a future life, than that a Being which always thinks, may be continued in the same state. (Cockburn, in Sheridan (ed) 2006: 53)

As Cockburn points out, the notion that the soul is always thinking is not used as evidence for the soul’s immortality. Locke’s claim to the contrary thus ought not count as evidence against it, and we ought to have faith that an omnipotent God will ensure the soul’s immortality (whether it always thinks or not). Additionally, there is ample evidence that Locke thinks the soul is immortal, and that persons will go on to receive divine punishment and reward in the next life for their deeds in this life. This comes through not just in L-N 2.27 of the Essay , but also in Locke’s correspondence with Stillingfleet, and many of Locke’s religious writings, including the posthumously published “ Resurrectio et quae secuuntur ” (though Cockburn would not have had access to the latter while drafting her Defence ). [ 11 ]

Finally, Cockburn argues that the assumption that Locke’s view entails that we “awake with new souls each morning” rests on a misunderstanding. Just as a body that was in motion and comes to rest does not become a new body once it starts moving again, a soul that was thinking and ceases to think does not become a new soul once thought is restored to it. Thus, Locke’s claim that we do not always think—and indeed may have dreamless sleep—does not have the absurd consequences for the persistence of persons that the pamphlets charge. To this it might also be added that even if we awake with new souls each morning, it need not mean that we are new persons each morning, according to Locke.

Through the Defence , Cockburn additionally makes clear that although Locke’s theory of personal identity allows for sci-fi switches such as those described in the “prince and the cobbler” passage (L-N 2.27.15), the “waking and sleeping Socrates” passage (2.27.19), and the “day and night-man” passage (2.27.23), Locke does not think that this is the way things ordinarily go. In other words, in Locke’s view it is not that persons are switching bodies and swapping souls on a regular basis. Rather, Locke is making clear that we should distinguish between the concepts “man”, “body”, “soul”, and “person”. Moreover, the persistence of any person does not always align with the persistence of a human being or soul, as many assume. Making this point is the purpose of those imaginary cases.

Sixty-seven years after Cockburn’s Defence , and twenty-one years after the correspondence between Cockburn and Edmund Law ends, Law drafts a Defence of his own. Law’s Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity (1769) is later included in the 1823 version of Locke’s Works , and in it Law offers a particular reading of the ontological status of persons. Law defends a consciousness-based view, and makes much of Locke’s claim that person is a “forensic term”. Law moves from this point to the conclusion that Locke thinks persons are modes (or attributes) rather than substances (or things in themselves). He says,

Now the word Person , as is well observed by Mr. Locke …is properly a forensick term, and here to be used in the strickt forensick sense, denoting some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral agent, or an accountable creature; renders him the proper subject of Laws , and a true object of Rewards or Punishments. (1823: 1–2)

This is significant since whether Lockean persons are best thought of as substances, modes, or relations is something that is still debated amongst Locke scholars today.

While some philosophers were happy to defend Locke, as Cockburn and Law did, numerous philosophers writing in the eighteenth century utilized Locke’s theory of personal identity as a stepping stone to establish their own even more provocative views on persons. The ways in which these theorists go beyond Locke varies. Some of these are outlined below. [ 12 ]

In Anthony Collins’s correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1707–1708), it can often look as if Collins is a mere defender of Locke’s view. Collins holds a consciousness-based view of personal identity, and Collins invokes Locke’s discussion of persons and their persistence conditions throughout this lengthy exchange. Nevertheless, Collins takes Locke’s assertion that for all we know God could have superadded the ability to think to formerly inert systems of matter, and runs with it. As Larry Jorgensen puts it,

A significant difference between Collins and Locke…is that Collins thought that material systems provided a better explanatory basis for consciousness, which changes the probability calculus. Collins provides evidence that casts doubt on Locke’s claim that “it is in the highest degree probable” that humans have immaterial souls. Although he is building from a Lockean starting point, namely the possibility that God might superadd thinking to matter, he ends up with a naturalized version: thinking “follows from the composition or modification of a material system” (Clarke and Collins 2011: 48). (Jorgensen forthcoming)

Collins’s view on personal identity is a consciousness-based view, but what gives rise to consciousness, according to Collins, is likely a material system. Thus some take Locke’s purported agnosticism about the substantial nature of finite thinkers, and proceed more forcefully in the direction of materialism. In other words, Locke’s views on the substantial nature of finite thinkers opens the door to materialist views of persons and their persistence conditions.

Others take criticisms launched at Locke’s theory of personal identity, including the criticism that the self (or persisting self) is a fiction, and appear to embrace such consequences. [ 13 ] This can be seen rather readily in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1738). In the Treatise , Hume asserts that it is not clear how we can even have an idea of the self. This is because most take selves to be persisting entities, and all of our ideas come from corresponding impressions. But since our impressions constantly change, there is no one impression that can give rise to the idea we call “self”. Of this Hume says,

It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos’d to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, thro the whole course of our lives; since self is suppos’d to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea. (1738 Book I, Part IV, Section VI [1896: 251–252])

Moreover, whenever Hume looks for himself, all he finds are impressions. He says,

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (1738 [1896: 252])

This leads Hume to claim that we are just bundles of perceptions, in constant flux (1738 [1896: 252]).

Thus it is not only the case that we fail to have an idea of the self, according to Hume, but also the case that, properly speaking, no subsisting self persists from one moment to the next. It is the imagination that leads us astray when we think of ourselves, and other entities, as persisting over time (1738 [1896: 254]). As Hume puts it,

The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. (1738 [1896: 259])

It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects. (1738 [1896: 259])

In moving away from a more traditional substance-based view of personal identity (where the identity of person lies in the identity of soul), Locke opens the door to more fragmentary treatments of selves and persons. [ 14 ]

Along similar lines, some take Locke’s claim that the identity of persons lies in the identity of consciousness as fuel for the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no special relation between person x and any other future person. That is, personal identity only exists between present and past selves, not present and future selves. For this reason, we ought not have prudential concern, or concern for a future self that is distinct from our concern for others. This is the argumentative move that William Hazlitt makes, and in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he explicitly sets as his task showing

…that the human mind is naturally disinterested, or that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interests. (1805: 1)

This line of argumentation is replicated and expanded almost one hundred and eighty years later by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984), though it does not appear that Parfit is aware of Hazlitt’s view when he drafts his own. [ 15 ]

This section briefly outlines the lasting impact that Locke has had on the debate over persons and their persistence conditions by exploring how Locke’s theory of personal identity gets taken up in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most metaphysicians contributing to the debate over personal identity refer to Locke’s treatment of persons in their texts. Many even directly respond to Locke’s view as they flesh out their own.

Most who hold psychological continuity theories of personal identity take their views to be descendants of Locke’s. This is true of John Perry (1975), David Lewis (1976), Sydney Shoemaker (1984), and Derek Parfit (1984), for instance (Schechtman “Memory, Identity, and Sameness of Consciousness”, forthcoming in The Lockean Mind ). In fact, Parfit defends what he calls a “Lockean view” as recently as 2016 (34). What makes each of these views Lockean (at least according to their authors) is that, as Locke does, they take personal identity to consist in the continuity of psychological life, and they take this to mean that personal identity is relational. Moreover, like Locke, they emphasize the forensic nature of personhood.

Marya Schechtman offers a rival interpretation to those held by Perry, Lewis, Shoemaker, and Parfit, but Locke is very much in the foreground of Schechtman’s narrative account as well. In The Constitution of Selves (1996: 15), Schechtman claims,

The argument that personal identity must be defined in psychological terms is first systematically presented and defended by Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding

Schechtman then goes on to show that the project of psychological continuity theorists is “incoherent” because

[t]he goal of offering reidentification criterion is fundamentally at odds with the goal of defining personal identity in terms of psychological continuity…. (1996: 24)

Importantly, Schechtman does this not just by making a passing reference to Locke and then treating Parfit, Perry, and the like, but via a thorough examination of Locke’s theory, and the objections raised to it by Butler, Reid, and others.

Moreover, this is the case not only in Schechtman’s earlier work, but in her most recent work as well. Schechtman includes a thirty-two page chapter titled, “Locke and the Psychological Continuity Theorists” at the start of Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (2014), and in “Memory, Identity, and Sameness of Consciousness”, Schechtman turns to recent developments in the psychological study of memory to update Locke’s view to “…capture some of the crucial insights of Locke’s account, and show why it remains relevant and influential” (in The Lockean Mind , forthcoming).

Those who defend animalism—or the view that persons just are human organisms—hold a position that is quite different from psychological continuity theories or narrative based views. Still, most animalists respond to Locke. Some even invoke Locke’s view as they develop their own. For example, Eric Olson’s animalist view relies very heavily both on Locke’s conception of “life”, and the persistence conditions Locke gives for organisms (1997: 137–138, etc.). This is why Olson describes his view as “Lockean”.

At the same time, some animalists blame Locke for separating the discussion of persons and personal identity from the discussion of human beings or human animals. In Animalism: New Essays on Persons, Animals & Identity , Stephen Blatti and Paul Snowdon ask, “Why was the idea of an animal conspicuously absent…” in the personal identity debate for so long (2016: 3)? They go on,

To answer this question, we need to return to Locke’s famous discussion of personal identity, in which the notion of an animal was central…Locke exercised great care in specifying the different ideas for which the words ‘animal’ and ‘person’ stood. A reasonable conjecture, or proposal, we suggest, is that Locke’s treatment of these two terms and notions was so effective that it generated in people engaging with the problem the conviction that the notion of a person is the central one fixing the type of thing the problem is about, with the consequence that the notion of an animal was lost to sight. (2016: 3)

Locke does much to distinguish between human beings (or men)—which are animals—and persons, and Blatti and Snowdon assert that this sets the stage for how the personal identity debate plays out for the next several hundred years. In other words, Locke is the reason that animalist views do not emerge until later in the twentieth century. [ 16 ]

Finally, even those working to carve out an entirely new space for the discussion of persons and their persistence conditions say something about Locke as they proceed. Leke Adeofe outlines and develops a tripartite picture of persons according to what he calls the “African thought system”. As he does, Adeofe aligns his approach with Locke’s. He says,

My approach, partly descriptive and partly imaginative, ought to be familiar; it has been borrowed from a tradition that dates back at least to John Locke. (2004: 69)

Moreover, this is the case even though Adeofe uses the African, or Yoruba, conception of “person” to challenge Western philosophy’s treatment of persons and their persistence conditions.

In Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (1988), Kathleen Wilkes takes aim at the proliferation of thought experiments in the personal identity literature. It is clear that Wilkes has the elaborate thought experiments that Parfit employs (including teletransportation, split brain cases, etc.) in mind throughout her critique. But, it is also clear that Wilkes traces this methodology back to Locke. Of this she says,

The subject of personal identity…has probably exploited the method [of thought experiments] more than any other problem area in philosophy. Many of the examples are familiar:…Locke testing ‘what we would say if’ the soul of a cobbler migrated into the body of a prince, or if the Mayor of Queinborough awoke one day with all of Socrates’ memories. (Wilkes 1988: 6)

The “prince and the cobbler” passage, or L-N 2.27.15, proceeds in the opposite direction, with Locke asking us what we would conclude about the soul of a prince entering and informing the body of a cobbler, but, regardless, Wilkes takes Locke and the tradition that follows, as her target as she works to move the discussion of personal identity away from fantasy cases and toward real-life ones.

Locke’s discussion of personal identity is central to the current debate over persons and their persistence conditions. Nevertheless, there are many different versions of Locke’s view that contemporary metaphysicians take themselves to be embracing or rejecting. Even those who describe their respective views as “Lockean”—Parfit and Olson, for instance—can end up defending very different pictures of persons. This highlights just how difficult it is to determine what Locke’s view on persons and their persistence conditions amounts to, despite how clear its importance is.

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animalism | Clarke, Samuel | Cockburn, Catharine Trotter | consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of | Descartes, René | Hume, David | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Locke, John | Locke, John: moral philosophy | personal identity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Chicago Early Modern Round Table for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this entry, Shelley Weinberg and an anonymous referee from SEP for insightful comments on later drafts. I’m also deeply indebted to Margaret Atherton, John Whipple, Marya Schechtman, and the many audiences I’ve gotten feedback from when I was just starting to think about Locke on personhood and personal identity.

Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Gordon-Roth < gordo216 @ umn . edu >

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