What is a Person?: Realities, Constructs, Illusions
Cambridge University Press, 12/19/2019
EAN 9781108478076, ISBN10: 1108478077
Hardcover, 294 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
In this book, John M. Rist offers an account of the concept of 'person' as it has developed in the West, and how it has become alien in a post-Christian culture. He begins by identifying the 'mainline tradition' about persons as it evolved from the time of Plato to the High Middle Ages, then turns to successive attacks on it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then proceeds to the 'five ways' in which the tradition was savaged or distorted in the nineteenth century and beyond. He concludes by considering whether ideas from contemporary philosophical movements, those that combine a closer analysis of human nature with a more traditional metaphysical background, may enable the tradition to be restored. A timely book on a theme of universal significance, Rist ponders whether we persons matter, and how we have reached a position where we are not sure whether we do.
Part I. Constructing the 'Mainline Tradition'
1. The first foundations
Plato and Aristotle
2. From Stoic individuals and personae to Christian persons
3. Mixtures
Plotinus, Porphyry, Nemesius
4. Augustine's personae
theology, metaphysics, history
5. The definition
Boethius and Richard of Saint Victor
6. Toward a synthesis
Thomas Aquinas
7. Between two worlds
Duns Scotus
Part II. No God, No Soul
What Person?
8. Virtue, 'virtue', rights
9. Descartes on soul, self, mind, nature
10. Personal identity from Hobbes to Locke
11. After Locke
12. Sympathy or empathy
Richardson, Hume, Smith
13. Ambiguous Rousseau's soul and 'moi'
14. Kant's rational autonomy
Part III. Toward Disabling the Person
15. Introducing the five ways
16. Assimilation and homogenization
17. The way of Prometheus
18. Whistling in the humanitarian wind
19. Virtual morality
propaganda as social glue
20. The way to an absolute nihilism
Part IV. Persons Restored or Final Solution?
21. Parfit and Heidegger
22. Strawson and Nagel
23. Personalism, phenomenology, Edith Stein
24. God made Adam and Eve.