What is a Person?
Realities, Constructs, Illusions

Explores how the concept of person developed from both non-Christian and Christian sources and the ensuing of post-Christian culture.

John M. Rist (Author)

9781108478076, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2019

294 pages
23.4 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'What is a Person? is the fruit of enormous learning and a mind capable of contextualizing philosophers differing in language, culture, and historical contexts in a clear, memorable style of exposition.' Christopher Kaczor, The Thomist

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.

Subject Areas: Religious issues & debates [HRAM], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Philosophy [HP]