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Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226765946
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
The task of understanding human beings, what we ourselves are, our constitution and condition, is a perennial problem in philosophy and related disciplines. Smith argues here that our understanding of human persons is threatened by technological development and capricious academic theories alike, seeking to deny or relativize the personhood of humanity. Smith's book puts a stake in the ground, in defense of a view of the human that is genuinely humanistic in the traditional sense and capable of sustaining with intellectual coherence things like modern human rights and universal benevolence.
Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226765946
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
The task of understanding human beings, what we ourselves are, our constitution and condition, is a perennial problem in philosophy and related disciplines. Smith argues here that our understanding of human persons is threatened by technological development and capricious academic theories alike, seeking to deny or relativize the personhood of humanity. Smith's book puts a stake in the ground, in defense of a view of the human that is genuinely humanistic in the traditional sense and capable of sustaining with intellectual coherence things like modern human rights and universal benevolence.
Author: Jack Martin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018080
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
A new examination of the psychology of personhood, which views persons as irreducibly embodied and socially situated beings.
Author: Sarah Bishop Merrill
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042005716
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Many debates in biomedical ethics today involve inconsistencies in defining the key term, person. Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, beg the question about what constitutes personhood. This book explores the arguments concerning definitions of personhood in the history of modern philosophy, and then constructs a superior model, defined in terms of distinctive features (a theoretical concept borrowed from linguistics). This model is shown to have distinct advantages over the necessary and sufficient condition models of personhood launched by essentialists. Philosophers historically have been correct about what some of the pivotal distinctive features of personhood are, e.q., rationality, communications and self-consciousness, but they have been wrong about the methods of recognizing and asserting personhood, and about the relative importance of feelings. In clinical care, complaints often surface that care is not personal. This book aims to improve care through providing a method of attending to patients as people. Charts in the Appendices show that where physicians attended to personal features important to their patients, sometimes the patients rated the care even higher than the physician did. The book will be useful to health-care providers whose goals include improving quality of care, listening to patients, and preventing malpractice.
Author: Chris Fowler
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415317214
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
The Archaeology of Personhood discusses what it means to be human and, by drawing on examples from European prehistory, discusses the implications that contemporary understandings of personhood have on archaeological interpretation.
Author: Richard Eldridge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226203164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents a convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of a historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as a formula of value and for acting according to it. Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a revised version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, a stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself. Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature—literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality—is a primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain. On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.
Author: Visa A. J. Kurki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198844034
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Présentation de l'éditeur: "This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic."
Author: Michael Lambek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521627375
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Large-scale comparisons are out of fashion in anthropology, but this book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, which is understood in terms of what anthropologists call 'embodiment'. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit possession, to the logics of witchcraft and kinship relations, the use of rituals to heal the sick, 'electric vampires', and even the impact of capitalism. There are detailed ethnographic analyses, and suggestive comparisons of classic African and Melanesian ethnographic cases, such as the Nuer and the Melpa. The contributors debate alternative strategies for cross-cultural comparison, and demonstrate that there is a surprising range of continuities, putting in question common assumptions about the huge differences between these two parts of the world.
Author: John P. Lizza
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801888999
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
In this riveting and timely work, John P. Lizza presents the first comprehensive analysis of personhood and humanity in the context of defining death. Rejecting the common assumption that human or personal death is simply a biological phenomenon for biologists or physicians to define, Lizza argues that the definition of death is also a matter for metaphysical reflection, moral choice, and cultural acceptance. Lizza maintains that defining death remains problematic because basic ontological, ethical, and cultural issues have never been adequately addressed. Advances in life-sustaining technology and organ transplantation have led to revision of the legal definition of death. It is generally accepted that death occurs when all functions of the brain have ceased. However, legal and clinical cases involving postmortem pregnancy, individuals in permanent vegetative state, those with anencephaly, and those with severe dementia challenge the neurological criteria. Is "brain death" really death? Should the neurological criteria be expanded to include individuals in permanent vegetative state, with anencephaly, and those with severe dementia? What metaphysical, ethical, and cultural considerations are relevant to answering such questions? Although Lizza accepts a pluralistic approach to the legal definition of death, he proposes a nonreductive, substantive view in which persons are understood as "constituted by" human organisms. This view, he argues, provides the best account of human nature as biological, moral, and cultural and supports a consciousness-related formulation of death. Through an analysis of legal and clinical cases and a discussion of alternative concepts of personhood, Lizza casts greater light on the underlying themes of a complex debate.
Author: Joseph F. Fletcher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780879751234
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Author: JeeLoo Liu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107000750
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
New essays connecting recent scientific studies with traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Leading philosophers offer contrasting perspectives on the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, and the notion of personhood. Essential reading for philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and psychologists.
