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Person
Person is a concept that has been addressed at length by many philosophers throughout the ages. The question of what it means to be a person has been approached through etymological, religious, analytical, phenomenological, and ontological perspectives. Etymologically, person as a human being originated from the Latin word homo, which is a technical term rather than a philosophical term. Homo denotes a physical man or woman, and it is connected to humus or ground as an effort to distinguish human beings from the Roman gods. Scholars are interested in understanding person from more textured philosophical perspectives because this understanding is critical to a comprehensive exploration of identity. The idea of person has been connected to concepts including rationality, intentionality, consciousness, and mind-body relationships. A consideration of these different perspectives provides a panoramic view of the relationship between person and identity.
Form and Matter
From some religious perspectives, a person is a coexistence of both spiritual and material aspects. Theologians consider the idea of person as a coexistent body and soul, which suggests a person is a union of form and matter. From this perspective, one part of the soul, the intellect, elevates the conception of person above all other animals. In this religious framework, a body is not a person and a soul is not a person but the person is constituted in the union of these two essences.
Analytical philosophies distinguished the concept of human being from the concept of a person through an understanding of consciousness. The nature of what constitutes consciousness has been explored from many different perspectives that range from rejecting the existence of consciousness at one end to perspectives that claim there is only consciousness, which implies there is no reality apart from whatever “has” consciousness. Some scholars find that to accept the existence of consciousness, human beings must first deny its existence, but other scholars suggest that the process of awareness by which we make decisions is consciousness or the thinking part of being. In this case, person is a name for this conscious self. Some more complex philosophies suggest that a person is present and past existence by the consciousness that owns and commits to past actions. Other philosophies from psychological perspectives suggest that the physical embodiment of a corporeal human being can be more than one person if there is more than one consciousness. So, one physical human being can be more than one person if she or he has more than one consciousness. Nevertheless, a person is something, an entity, whose actions are imbued with responsibility. Because of this responsibility, people impose laws on themselves, and this imposition of laws requires some kind of reason.
Form and Being
The question whether a person is a mental or physical entity is considered at length in analytical philosophy. From this perspective, the idea of a person is a unitary being comprising a psychological (mentalistic) and material (physicalistic) foundation. Ontological considerations of person refer to the anyone, which is a complete amassment of norms for a community that embraces conformity. These norms determine the behavioral dispositions of nondeviant members of the community who are deemed the conformists. The idea of person involves the ontic notion of conforming. Conforming is the essence of community because persons conform as particular cases or occurrences that make up the larger community. A person is not a whole of Dasein (Being) because Dasein cannot be measured as people can be measured. A person is therefore an occurrence or a case of Dasein, which is an expansive phenomenon of individual occurrences.
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- Complex Inequality
- Critical Race Theory
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- Philosophy of Organization and Identity
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- Self
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- Passing
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- English as a Second Language (ESL)
- Ethnicity
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- Figures of Speech
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- Invariant Be
- Labeling
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- Language Development
- Language Loss
- Language Variety in Literature
- Narratives
- Phonological Elements of Identity
- Pidgin/Creole
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- Public Sphere
- Rhetoric
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- Satire
- Semantics
- Semiotics
- Signification
- Structuration
- Style/Diction
- Symbolism
- Tag Question
- Trickster Figure
- Living Ethically
- Media and Popular Culture
- Articulation Theory
- Consciousness
- Consumption
- Critical Theory
- Cultural Capital
- Cultural Studies
- Embeddedness/Embedded Identity
- Framing
- Frankfurt School
- Globalization
- Material Culture
- Media Studies
- Mediation
- Propaganda
- Social Capital
- Society of the Spectacle
- Spectacle and the Self
- Stock Character
- Surveillance and the Panopticon
- Technology
- Values
- Visual Culture
- Visual Pleasure
- Nationality
- Citizenship
- Civic Identity
- Clan Identity
- Collective/Social Identity
- Collectivism/Individualism
- Culture
- Diaspora
- First Nations
- Historicity
- Identity and Democracy
- Immigration
- Memory
- Nationalism
- Patriotism
- Philosophical History of Identity
- Political Identity
- Sovereignty
- State Identity
- Terrorism
- Third World
- Transnationalism
- Transworld Identity
- War
- Worldview
- Protecting Identity
- Relating across Cultures
- Religion
- Representations of Identity
- Archetype
- Attribution
- Authenticity
- Basking in Reflected Glory
- Bricolage
- Commodity Self
- Critical Realism
- Cultural Representation
- Desire and the Looking-Glass Self
- Existentialist Identity Questions
- Extraordinary Bodies
- Hyperreality and Simulation
- Identification
- Identity Politics
- Intertextuality
- Looking-Glass Self
- Masking
- Material Culture
- Mimesis
- Minstrelsy
- Orientalism
- Other, The
- Philosophy of Organization and Identity
- Race Performance
- Self-Presentation
- Social Constructionist Approach to Personal Identity
- Social Constructivist Approach to Political Identity
- Stereotypes
- Subjectivity
- Theories of Identity
- Afrocentricity
- Articulation Theory
- Asiacentricity
- Black Atlantic
- Cognitive Dissonance Theory
- Communication Competence
- Communication Theory of Identity
- Contact Hypothesis
- Corporate Identity
- Critical Race Theory
- Critical Realism
- Critical Theory
- Cultivation Theory
- Cultural Contracts Theory
- Enryo-Sasshi Theory
- Ethnolinguistic Identity Theory
- Eurocentricity
- Global Village
- Identity Scripts
- Immediacy
- Interaction Order
- Mirror Stage of Identity Development
- Modernity and Postmodernity
- Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
- Organizational Identity
- Otherness, History of
- Persistence, Termination, and Memory
- Phenomenology
- Philosophy of Identity
- Political Economy
- Postliberalism
- Pragmatics
- Public Sphere
- Racial Contracts
- Regulatory Focus Theory
- Social Comparison Theory
- Social Economy
- Social Identity Theory
- Sociometer Hypothesis
- Symbolic Interactionism
- Terror Management Theory
- Theory of Mind
- Third Culture Building
- Uncertainty Avoidance
- World Systems Theory
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