Person

For other uses, see Person (disambiguation).

A person (plural: persons or people; from Latin: [persona] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), meaning "mask") is a being, such as a human, that has certain capacities or attributes constituting personhood, the precise definition of which is the subject of much controversy.

Prior to the advent of Christianity, the word "persona" (Latin) or "prosopon" (πρόσωπον: Greek) referred to the masks worn by actors on stage. The various masks represented the various "personae" in the stage play, while the masks themselves helped the actor's voice resonate and easier for the audience to hear. In Roman law, the word "persona" could also refer to a legal entity. The concept of a "person" was further developed during the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the first through sixth centuries.

Since then, a number of important changes to the word's meaning and use have taken place, and attempts have been made to redefine the word with varying degrees of adoption and influence.

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Personhood

An abstract painting of a person by Paul Klee. The concept of a person can be very challenging to define.

Main article: Personhood

The criteria for being a person... are designed to capture those attributes which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives.

— Harry G. Frankfurt

Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law, and is closely tied to legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability. Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate. Historically, personhood was questioned during the abolition of slavery, the fight for women's rights, debates about abortion, fetal rights and reproductive rights as well as debates about corporate personhood.

Various specific debates have focused and continue to focus on questions about the personhood of different classes of entities. Historically, the personhood of woman and slaves has been a point of social upheaval. Today, most adult humans are usually considered persons, but depending on the context, theory or definition, the category of "person" may be taken to include such non-human entities as animals, corporations, artificial intelligences, or extraterrestrial life; and may exclude some human entities in prenatal development or those with extreme mental impairments or injuries.

Personal identity

What does it take for individuals to persist from moment to moment — or in other words, for the same individual to exist at different moments?

Main article: Personal identity

Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of persons through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is sometimes referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

Identity is an issue for both continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. A key question in continental philosophy is in what sense we can maintain the modern conception of identity, while realizing many of our prior assumptions about the world are incorrect.

Proposed solutions to the problem of personal identity include continuity of the physical body, continuity of an immaterial mind or soul, continuity of consciousness or memory, the bundle theory of self, and proposals that there are actually no persons or selves which persists over time at all.

See also

• Anthropocentrism
• Anthropology
• Beginning of human personhood
• Being
• Capitis deminutio
• Character
• Citizenship
• Consciousness
• Corporate personhood
• Great Ape personhood
• Juridical person
• Juristic person
• Human
• Identity

• Individual
• Kant
• Legal fiction
• Nonperson
• People
• Personality
• Personhood movement
• Personoid
• Phenomenology
• Subject (philosophy)
• Surety
• Theory of mind

Further reading

• Lukes, Steven; Carrithers, Michael; Collins, Steven, eds. (1987). The category of the person: Anthropology, philosophy, history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-27757-4.
• Cornelia J.de Vogel The concept of personality in Greek and Christian thought. In Studies in philosophy and the history of philosophy. Vol. 2. Edited by J. K. Ryan, Washington: Catholic University of America Press 1963. pp. 20–60
• Puccetti, Roland (1968). Persons: A Study of Possible Moral Agents in the Universe. London: Macmillan and Company.

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• Korfmacher, Carsten (May 29, 2006). "Personal Identity". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2011-03-09.

External links

• Rights of Non-Human Persons Program (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies)

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