What is a person? : realities, constructs, illusions /

Deeply entrenched in the Catholic-Christian tradition, this investigation offers a provocative account of the concept "person" from Plato to the present. If Rist is correct, the loss of the "Mainline Tradition," wherein the concept "person" was intimately connected with beliefs about God and soul, results in an erosion of the inherent value of persons. The text proceeds through four historical periods: first, the foundational Mainline Tradition; second, the loss of this tradition as demonstrated by representatives of a period extending from early modernism through the early Enlightenment; third, the further "disabling" of personhood by the "humanitarian" interests of British Utilitarians as well as Continentalists such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx; and finally, the contemporary "high water mark of the destruction of the Mainline Tradition." The last is represented by the work of Derek Parfit and Martin Heidegger; the "more positive, but ultimately inadequate approach," represented by P. F. Strawson and Thomas Nagel; and the significantly better approach endorsed by Edith Stein. The result of this investigation is the denial of personhood as a socio-legal-moral "cluster" concept. Instead, persons are "conceived, not made…. Personhood is inalienable from conception to natural death even if subject to legal misdescription." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Heidi Storl, Augustana College (IL)