Persons and Selves in Buddhist Philosophy

While Buddhists famously deny the existence of a self, they distinguish between selves and persons, and allow for the existence of persons as entities having a sort of derived reality. By “self” they understand whatever counts as the essence of the psychophysical complex, while by “person” they understand the psychophysical complex as a whole. This essay explores the arguments whereby Buddhists sought to establish their claim that strictly speaking neither self nor person exists, but that persons are nonetheless useful posits of a scheme that is meant to accommodate our everyday interests and cognitive limitations. This yields a way of understanding the connection between reductionism about persons and consequentialism in ethics, as well as why it might be that puzzle cases have loomed so large in recent discussions of diachronic personal identity.

Persons in Patristic and Medieval Christian Theology

By surveying the history of Christian theology of the Trinity and Incarnation from Origen of Alexandria to William of Ockham, this chapter shows that Boethius’s addition of rationality to the definition of persona is a significant moment in the history of personhood. Among Greek and Syriac philosophical theologians, rationality was not included in theorizing about what made each divine individual or hypostasis (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) distinct from the others. The evidence surveyed suggests that rationality is included in the definition of a persona only in Latin authors after Boethius. Nevertheless, rationality did no substantive work in Boethius’s or later Latin authors’ theorizing about the Trinity or Incarnation with regard to personhood. Richard of St. Victor replaced Boethius’s “individual substance” with “incommunicable existence” in order to give a fully general definition of persona. This change was widely accepted by later philosophers (e.g., John Locke) and theologians.

The Concept of a Person in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy

Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, including major players such as Locke and Leibniz, discuss the concept of a person in the context of theological and moral questions. Particularly prominent are questions about the immortality of the soul and a life after death and about moral responsibility. These questions in turn connect to metaphysical issues, such as individuation and diachronic identity. This chapter examines how the three most important eighteenth-century German philosophers, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant, deal with these themes. Apart from many significant differences between these philosophers, especially with respect to Kant versus Leibniz and Wolff, there are also several important positive connections. These relate to the question of animal and human souls, the role consciousness plays in the constitution of personhood, and the link between the concept of a person in epistemology and metaphysics on the one hand and in practical philosophy on the other.

Persons in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy

This chapter examines the rise of the problem of personal identity and the relation between moral and metaphysical personhood in early modern Britain. I begin with Thomas Hobbes, who presents the first modern version of the problem of diachronic identity but does not apply it to persons. I then turn to John Locke, who grounds the persistence of persons in a continuity of consciousness that is important because it is necessary for morality, thus subordinating metaphysical personhood to moral personhood. Finally, I examine how the relationship between moral personhood and metaphysical personhood is treated in three of Locke’s critics: Edmund Law, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, and David Hume.

Medieval Mystics on Persons

The thirteenth to fifteenth centuries were witness to lively and broad-ranging debates about the nature of persons. In logical and grammatical discussions, “person” indicated individuality. In the legal-political realm, “person” separated subjects from objects. In theological contexts, “person” appears most often in Trinitarian and Christological debates: God was three persons in one Being, and Christ was one person with two natures (human and divine). This chapter looks at how these uses of “person” overlap in the works of contemplatives in the Latin West such as Hadewijch, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Catherine of Siena. I argue that the key concepts of individuality, dignity, and rationality combine with the contemplative use of first and second person perspectives, personification, and introspection to yield a concept of “person” that both prefigures Locke’s classic seventeenth-century definition and deeply influences the development of personalism.

Persons in Islamicate Philosophy from Ibn Sīnā to Sabzavārī

The medieval learning tradition brought personhood firmly within the purview of philosophy. As commonplace as the empirical and mathematical sciences were throughout the Islamicate period, however, philosophy did not require the same explanatory intent expected of the positive investigation into phenomena. Person was not the object of experience that personality, individuality, and ego are for modern psychology. Nor was shakhṣ (person, particular) conflated with fard (distinct individual, odd number) or nafs (self, soul), each of which functioned differently in the discourse. This chapter focuses on personhood as part of the inquiry into the question of being, central to which is the archetypal essence—as opposed to biological and other contingent features—of the speaking, thinking, collaborating animal called human. Here, the interlacing of man’s oneness and manifoldness originates in the divine unfolding of knowing and being.

Funerals, Faces, and Hellenistic Philosophers

In this chapter two phases of the origins and development of the concept of person in ancient Rome are discussed. In a prephilosophical phase, the origins of the word can be traced back to the Etruscans and the Greeks, respectively. The Latin word persona is most likely of Etruscan origin. At first the Romans used this word as a religious term. At the end of the second century BCE it came to be applied in the context of the Greek theatre, too. Panaetius, in his “Romanized” version of Stoicism, as preserved and developed by Cicero, reinterpreted the Greek and Etruscan understanding of person in the sense of the general and particular roles that human beings take on in life. Seneca, but more especially Epictetus and Boethius, developed these interpretations further, each with a different emphasis: Epictetus discussed person from an internal point of view, whereas Boethius formulated his influential definition of person in the debate on the nature of Christ.

Persons and Moral Status

This chapter focuses on moral personhood understood in terms of the notion of moral status. An entity is said to have moral status only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Nonutilitarians tend to think of moral status in terms of entitlements and protections that can conflict with, and sometimes override, doing what would maximize the good and minimize the bad. If moral status comes in degrees, and if there is a status of the highest degree (i.e., full moral status), then moral persons are those with full moral status. After giving a more precise account of it, we assess different views of what it takes to qualify for full moral status (some of which appeal to metaphysical notions of person). We also briefly discuss how metaphysical notions of personhood are put to moral use in utilitarian moral theorizing that eschews the notion of moral personhood.

Personhood in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Philosophy

This chapter surveys the respective influences of personalism and of analytic philosophy on twentieth-century thought about persons. It shows that personalism promoted a concept of personhood that is supportive of human dignity and conducive to positive moral and social engagement, as exemplified in personalism’s best-known representative, Martin Luther King, Jr. By contrast, the analytic tradition has exhibited a persistent tendency to undermine personhood as King and the personalists understood it, while failing to supply a metaphysically and morally adequate alternative. This unfortunate legacy is worth reversing if possible. With this in mind, I suggest that contemporary analytic philosophy has something important to learn from personalism concerning what counts as an adequate metaphysical basis for human dignity and the moral life.

The Minotaur

Ancient concepts of the person emerge not only from philosophical works but from literature and myth. Using a contemporary painting by the artist Erika Meriaux, this reflection focuses on the mythological story of the Minotaur, a creature who awkwardly straddles the boundary between human and animal, between person and nonperson. The Minotaur foreshadows modern anxiety about boundary cases: the clever dolphin or mentally challenged child. What obligations are owed to such a being? Meriaux's painting follows in the footsteps of some ancient writers in emphasizing the monster's human characteristics; yet he remains stubbornly bovine. Is it possible to be a person without being human? Meriaux's depiction challenges us to respond but leaves the answer up to us