Personhood as Relational

This paper considers the hotly debated issue of whether one should grant moral and legal personhood to intelligent robots once they have achieved a certain standard of sophistication based on such criteria as rationality, autonomy, and social relations. The starting point for the analysis is the European Parliament’s resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017) and its recommendation that robots be granted legal status and electronic personhood. The resolution is discussed against the background of the so-called Robotics Open Letter, which is critical of the Civil Law Rules on Robotics (and particularly of §59 f.). The paper reviews issues related to the moral and legal status of intelligent robots and the notion of legal personhood, including an analysis of the relation between moral and legal personhood in general and with respect to robots in particular. It examines two analogies, to corporations (which are treated as legal persons) and animals, that have been proposed to elucidate the moral and legal status of robots. The paper concludes that one should not ascribe moral and legal personhood to currently existing robots, given their technological limitations, but that one should do so once they have achieved a certain level at which they would become comparable to human beings.

At the age of eight, C.S. “Jack” Lewis suffered a massive blow with the death of his mother. In the grievous aftermath, his father, Albert Lewis, sent Jack off to boarding school. The impact of these losses had repercussions that shaped Jack’s psyche in ways that were, arguably, unexpressed until he wrote Till We Have Faces. Through the character of Orual, one can see how Lewis portrayed the shedding of what Esther Bick calls the “second skin,” a type of psychic shield that often grows in children who have endured the failure or loss of a significant attachment figure. Bick’s theory will be the lens through which the story of Orual and Lewis’ early life experiences reveal how trauma can hinder the development of the self, but also how an encounter with God and with oneself can lead to the spiritual and emotional formation of full personhood.

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that category, we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives.

For "AI and Law—Ethical, Legal, and Socio-political Implications." Ed. John-Stewart Gordon. Special Issue of AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication.

https://rdcu.be/cc0OT (Full Text)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01129-1
https://philpapers.org/rec/GUNDWI

Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner.

In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence.

Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.

Der Ausdruck „Personalität“ markiert ein Grundproblem der Philosophie der Person: Was macht eine Entität zu einer Person? Häufig wird diese Frage als eine Frage nach denjenigen mentalen Fähigkeiten verstanden, aufgrund derer eine Entität zur Klasse der Personen ge-hört. Der Ansatz, der dieser Auffassung zugrunde liegt und den ich als den „psychologischen Ansatz der Konzeption von Personalität“ bezeichne, bringt eine Vielzahl von systematischen Schwierigkeiten mit sich. Als ebenso problematisch muss der „biologische Ansatz“ gelten, dessen Personalitätskonzeption nicht auf mentale Fähigkeiten, sondern auf die biologische Artzugehörigkeit zurückgreift. Mein Beitrag verfolgt daher das Ziel, eine Alternative zu die-sen Ansätzen und insbesondere ein neues Kriterium der Personalität zu entwickeln. Für die-ses Kriterium werden die Begriffe der Würde und der Lebensform des Menschen maßgeblich sein.

The labeling of fellow humans as “cannibals” is a trope employed by people across the globe, often in an effort to cast doubt on the humanity of others. In this study I am interested in alimentation, and specifically anthropophagy, not only as a signal of belonging and exclusion, but also as a site of rationalized, intentional actions through which individuals demonstrate their humanity and so become human. Specifically, personhood is intertwined in much of Africa with actions and sentiments that express sociality, compassion, and circulation. These orientations are not, however, automatic. Very familiar human anti-social sentiments – such as envy, jealousy, spite, indignation, contempt, and selfishness – can be very personally gratifying. At the same time, however, they are destructive, insulating, and excessive, and therefore grotesque. Behaviors such as gluttony, incest, greed, and, of primary interest here, the eating of human flesh – acts that prioritize unbridled self-interest and callous accumulation of vitality for personal benefit and individuated wellbeing – are often associated in Africa with witches and sorcerers. Human personhood is about controlling or repressing (or, at least appearing to control and repress) these tendencies in favor of collaboration, porosity, and sympathy, most of the time. This makes the project of being and becoming human a perpetual act, and there exists a necessity to continuously craft and maintain personhood through everyday behaviors. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I conducted a year-long dietary survey, participated in community activities, and engaged 20 principle informants in regular, unstructured conversation in their local language, and then used emergent ideas to guide informal discussions with a wide substrate of additional townspeople, I argue that avoiding acts that can be conceived as anthropophagous offers opportunities for individuals to prove their commitment to pro-sociality, and so to socially become human. Specifically, I articulate a series of prohibitions on not only cannibalism (as all societies have), but also on eating animals that resemble human beings in physical, emotional, and spiritual form. While the forbidden meats are rarely even an option to consume, articulating the taboos and exhibiting repugnance at the thought of eating these animals are significant for their contributions toward actively performing the moral underpinning of social living and constructing humanity. What I am proposing, then, is that the avoidance of cannibalism and pseudo-cannibalism are not just symbolic statements, gustatory preferences, or an assertion of benevolence to counter European misconceptions – they also constitute the self. The language and rationale that my informants used to describe their dietary proscriptions suggests that values on sociality, porosity, and circulation were not only grafted onto food taboos, but also intimately enacted and embodied through them. People are doing things with food prohibitions, not just following them out of routine. While taboos on cannibalism are thus significant as one of few customs that are globally universal, which seems to suggest a biological basis, it is clear that there is also much to the construction of disgust at the consumption of human flesh that is culturally specific.

В данной главе на основе феноменологического прочтения концепции "распределенной личности" Альфреда Гелла предлагается анализ аппрезентации Другого из опыта восприятия его тела. В такой перспективе "личностное" тело не может ограничиваться биологическим организмом, но ситуативно включает в себя также разнообразные материальные и виртуальные объекты, взятые в отношении некоторой личности и ее агентивности. Этот тезис развивается на материале мемориальных страниц умерших людей в социальных сетях и споров вокруг концепции "права на забвение" в интернете.

Публикация осуществлена при поддержке Российского научного фонда (грант № 18-18-00082)
The publication of research results was supported by Russian Science Foundation (grant № 18-18-00082)

Some Japanese go to shrine and pray for their happiness, luckiness, and safety. After pray, they bring a charm as protection from evil deeds. This practice is very common for Japanese especially for Shinto adherents. This charm called Omamori (お守り) from word mamoru (守る) means to protect. Omamori made from cloth or paper. That power who believed by Japanese for their successful. Based on that, I will focus on the function of Omamori and how modern Japanese reflect on personhood through Omamori in Shinto view. I will use Hallowell, The Ojibwa Ontology and Morrison, The Cosmos as Intersubjective. For Additional theory, there are A Preliminary Examination of the Omamori Phenomenon by Eugene Swanger and Ancient Magic and Modern Accessories: A Re-Examination of the Omamori Phenomenon by Eric Teixeira Mendes

Introduction
Part One: Seeing.
(Bruegel Allegory 1)

1. The Metaphysical Chiasm
2. The Existential Chiasm
3. The Aesthetically Chiasm

Part Two: Hearing.
(Bruegel Allegory 2)
4. Figures of Silence: Prelude
5. Language beyond Difference and Otherness: Interlude
6. The Interrupted Self: Postlude

Part Three: Touching.
(Bruegel Allegory 3)
7. Touch Me, Touch Me Not
8. The Sabbath of Experience.

Notes,
Bibliography,
Index

In traditional archaeological considerations of Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes, trackways are usually interpreted in largely normative terms, merely as means of getting from one settlement to another, or as purely functional features to assist with the herding of animals. In these somewhat static expositions, the role of trackways as places in themselves, and their long-term importance in constructions of social identity and memory, are often overlooked. So too are the complex relationships between people and animals enacted within trackways, field systems, and the wider landscape.

Recent theoretical ideas concerning relational agency and identity, materiality and movement have much to offer in terms of our archaeological understandings of these features. This paper explores the interpretative potential of such approaches using case studies of Iron Age and Romano-British trackways from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Integrating theories of identity, embodiment, materiality, relationality and practice highlights the sedentarism of previous explanations, and allows for much more nuanced accounts of highly dynamic, mobile meshworks, where agency resided in complex constraints and affordances between people, animals and the materiality of the lived-in landscape.

Personhood has become an important element of archaeological theory in the last two decades. Following C. Fowler's (2016) analysis, most approaches to the study of personhood conceptualise it through either a Single-Spectrum or a Multiple-Spectrum model. The former tends to assume that the tension between individual/dividual personhood is a central, structuring element of personhood, usually making use of extensive ethnographic analogies. The latter, on the other hand, rejects the centrality of the individual/dividual tension, along with any evolutionary understanding of the development of personhood and any sort of aprioristic assumption about how it might have looked in any given society. At the same time, the increasing popularity of posthumanist approaches, including the arrival of both the Ontological and Affective turns, raise questions about how these new trends will contribute to debates on personhood. This session aims to debate the current state of approaches to personhood in archaeology, particularly focusing on the following questions:
• To what extent are historical and ethnographic analogies still useful for the archaeological study of personhood?
• How can new approaches, such as New Materialism and the Ontological Turn, contribute to the study of non-human personhood?
• Is the single-spectrum model still relevant to the study of prehistoric personhood?
• How can archaeological approaches contribute to the study of personhood in contemporary societies?

A lo largo de las investigaciones en torno a gobernantes mayas, se tiene como base principal ubicarlos en una línea de tiempo referente a un sitio específico, fechas de entronización y/o muerte y su ascendencia y/o descendencia. Sin embargo, existen pocas aproximaciones en torno a la construcción de las identidades de estos personajes.
La propuesta para esta tesis va en el sentido de que las identidades se pueden construir a través de la práctica. La practica entendida como el conjunto de experiencias por las que pasa un individuo y aprende y reaprende en la cotidianeidad.

The discipline of archaeology has long engaged with animals in a utilitarian mode, constructing animals as objects to be hunted, manipulated, domesticated, and consumed. Only recently, in tandem with the rising interest in animals in the humanities and the development of interdisciplinary animal studies research, has archaeology begun to systematically engage with animals as subjects. This article describes some of the ways in which archaeologists are reconstructing human engagements with animals in the past, focusing on relational modes of interaction documented in many hunting and gathering societies. Among the most productive lines of evidence for human-animal relations in the past are animal burials and structured deposits of animal bones. These archaeological features provide material evidence for relational ontologies in which animals, like humans, were vested with sentience and agency.

Now out in affordable paperback: https://bit.ly/3IoFe7Y

Chapter 5 permanently available for free on the Routledge website via this link: https://bit.ly/38lPYXm

"Ikäheimo develops a distinctive and cogent case for the centrality of recognition to our nature as social animals and grounds it in a highly sophisticated analysis of the philosophical foundations of the concept of recognition. The resulting account of the complex, multifaceted, nature of social recognition is a significant contribution to the field."

Cillian McBride, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

"It takes an unusual combination of philosophical talents to accomplish what is so splendid and original about this book: presenting an overview of the origins and further elaborations of the German notion of 'recognition' by simultaneously outlining a systematic account of recognition’s role in the human form of life. Ikäheimo’s synthesis of conceptual history and systematization is at the same time hermeneutically sensitive and analytically rigorous, knowledgeable both of the history of German Idealism and of the current debates on human nature. For anyone interested in the richly layered role of recognition in human life this well-written and strongly argued book is a must-read."

Axel Honneth, Columbia University, USA

"Ikäheimo’s book proves his outstanding competence regarding one of the most influential theories in modern social philosophy: mutual recognition. He is both expert in its main sources—German idealism, critical theory, and pragmatism—and well versed with modern psychological and sociological evidence. Perhaps the most important achievement of the book is a justification of the universal claim to recognition on the basis of a constant human form of life, constituted by social cooperation under shared norms, aimed at future well-being and the development of 'full-fledged personhood'."

Ludwig Siep, University of Münster, Germany

"Because of the breadth and its always acute argumentation, Ikäheimo's book is not only essential reading for philosophers interested in the philosophy of recognition, but even more essential reading for those who believe that philosophical anthropology, social ontology, and moral theory can be done in the absence of a theory recognition."

Jay Bernstein, The New School

This is an English translation by J. PIna-Cabral of Part 1 of Henri-Alexandre Junod's ethnographic novel Zidji: A study of Southern African custom published in Neufchatel in 1911.  It is a fascinating description of the Tsonga circumcision school based on many direct accounts that Junod received at the end of the nineteenth century from people with whom he was very close.

In this chapter I explore how both anthropology and archaeology approach the study of relational personhood, focussing on the 'translation' of the concept into archaeology. In Strathern's terms (this volume) personhood can be seen as a 'boundary object'-a construct that "holds different meanings in different social worlds, yet is imbued with enough shared meaning to facilitate its translation across those worlds" (McSherry 2001: 69). The concept of 'relational personhood' was developed in anthropology to facilitate comprehension of certain non-western forms of personhood, but has since been applied in anthropology and elsewhere to thinking about personhood in all cultural contexts. A number of archaeologists have recently turned to anthropologists' interpretations of contemporary relational personhood for inspiration in their analyses of how personhood was conceptualised in the distant past. In this 'translation' archaeologists have presented different ways that relational personhood can operate to those identified by anthropologists. I will explore how the methods and interpretations of these archaeologists are different than, yet parallel to, the methods and interpretations of anthropologists. I focus in particular on a point of similarity: how partial information is articulated to produce a synthetic understanding of the communities studied. The chapter begins by outlining this point of similarity, then discusses the anthropological conception of relational personhood. It then turns to the archaeological adoption of the concept, and focuses in on some of the techniques of analysis by which archaeologists apprehend relational personhood. The discussion moves on to a comparison of how archaeologists and anthropologists compare when they analyse relational personhood in the contexts they examine, before considering the role of core disciplinary differences in how personhood is investigated. I conclude that further comparisons between the forms, media and operation of relationships provides a fertile area for future research in and across both disciplines.

The history of Pauline research has uncovered, as well as created, several dualisms, false dichotomies and cul-de-sacs that have played and still play a role in various interpretations of Paul. Susan Eastman's Paul and the Person (2017) sets out to reframe Paul's anthropology by opening a discursive window between Pauline scholarship and recent work in developmental psychology and neuroscience. In this article I discuss how Eastman manages to achieve this goal – by looking at her monograph from the perspective of five interpretative dichotomies: individual vs communal, Stoic vs Platonic and material vs immaterial, cognition vs emotion, relational vs ontological transformation, and human vs divine agency.

This article suggests first that the concept of interpersona l recognition be understood in a multidimensiona l (as opposed to one-dimensional) , practical (as opposed to
symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governe d response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model , or, more precisely, a value-base d model of due recognition. A further suggestion is that there is a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition , depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood , but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhoo d (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersona l recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood.

Keywords Honneth Recognition Respect Esteem Love Taylor Value

Last Draft of the Paper commissioned for The Husserlian Mind. Edited by Hanne Jacobs. The Routledge Philosophical Minds Series. New York Routledge (forthcoming)
Please cite accordingly.

What is it that makes us unique as persons? And how does this influence or even determine what we do and how we live? How can we put ourselves in a relation to ourselves and encounter, explore, and form who we are? What roles do others play in this process? These are questions that might not be known as the most prominent ones in Husserl's research program. They are, however, central for his self-understanding as a philosopher and for the broader, ethically transformative project of his transcendental phenomenology. I examine Husserl's writings on ethics and late writings on "border problems," as well as Ideas II to explore the connection between personhood and practical agency. By focusing on the issues of uniqueness, freedom, and unity, special attention will be paid to the ruptures and challenges of an overarching identity as well as to the constant interrelatedness of passivity and activity, given and formed personality.

(From the introduction by the editors:) Volker Rabens untersucht in seinem Beitrag „Sein und Werden in Beziehungen. Grundzüge relationaler Theologie bei Paulus und Johannes“, wie in diesen Textcorpora Relationen beschrieben werden, die Sein und (Verändert-)Werden des Menschen bestimmen. Rabens arbeitet heraus, „dass Relationalität in der paulinischen und johanneischen Literatur jeweils eigene Metaphorik und Ausdrucksformen gefunden hat, aber dass selbst auf der sprachlichen Ebene eine große Konvergenz festzustellen ist (z.B. in der Familien-Metaphorik).“ In seinem Aufsatz geht er im Anschluss an den Beitrag von Wilfried Härle auch ausführlich auf mögliche Missverständnisse gegenüber relationalen Ansätzen ein und profiliert diese so in Auseinandersetzung mit ihrer Kritik.

Se distinguen los tipos de crecimiento en el hombre principalmente el orgánico, el de la esencia humana y el del acto de ser personal. Se propone la esperanza y el don como lógica del cre- cimiento del ser personal y a Dios como crecimien- to originario absoluto en continuidad con la pro- puesta de Leonardo Polo

Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.

Throughout the thesis I take symbolic communication and visual metaphors as starting points for developing a contemporary picture of diverse Craft practices in a small corner of Scotland. As a result, this thesis is both an ethnography of Craft and a craft object, explicitly made to be a theory-laden object of material culture.

Both in its analysis and its subject matter, this thesis aims to question a variety of epistemological regimes found not only in anthropology, but also in the North-East of Scotland. The main argument of this thesis is that in order to understand something about Craft and the experiences of its makers it is important to have an understanding of the ways in which they create that world as meaningful: that is, an understanding of the thirdness (or symbolism) that is an active, generative force in that world. In the following chapters I argue two interwoven points: one, that a stash (collection) is a collection of stash (craft materials) and is also a site of thirdness in which symbolic thought and action are vital. And two: that, as such, stash and the craft world in which it is embedded are well served by an approach to visual anthropology that takes seriously a study of semiotics in which poetics become more than a subject of analysis; poetics are also allowed to develop into a method(ology) of engaging both informants and audience in a meaningful dialogue of knowledge production.

By using images to contextualize ethnographic evidence and by making these previous points not only with words, but also through imagery, I aim to convince the reader of the integrity of my ethnographic analyses as well as that theories of visual anthropology are as useful for analysing anthropological subjects as for communicating ourselves.

"This volume contains the workshop papers of the philosophical conference Dimensions of Personhood held in August 13-15, 2004 at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Finnish Academy research project The Concept of Person. In the call for papers, the theme of the conference was formulated as follows. Recent developments in neuroscience and information technology, in medicine and biotechnology, and in society and culture more broadly have made various questions concerning our identity as human beings urgent. As our power over ourselves increases, the questions of who we are, how we are to conceive of ourselves and how we should use our powers over ourselves, become more and more pressing. The concept of person is in many ways a necessary starting point in answering such questions.
However, the concept is often used in an indeterminate sense, and when efforts have been made to clarify the concept, different philosophers have ended up with rival usages and rival theories. For example, the theories differ on whether ‘person’ is identical with ‘human being’, ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Yet it seems to us that the rival theories of personhood are trying to capture a common idea, namely that persons differ from (other) animals, machines, detached ‘minds’, brains and sub-personal mechanisms in the kind of relations to self, to others and to the world that they
have, or are capable of having.
The general idea of the conference is thus to approach personhood along three dimensions, where the being of persons differs from the being of non-persons:
1 self-relations,
2. interpersonal relations, and
3. world-relations.
The guiding question of the conference is: how does the concept of person illuminate these relations (to self, to others, to the world), and how do these relations illuminate
the concept of person? Our wish is to bring together recent work done in each of these dimensions and further our understanding concerning the ways in which personhood and these relations are intertwined."

Arendt’s phenomenology of the political puts persons at the center. It is persons who act and who become who they are by interacting with and appearing before others. By generating stories through their actions, persons gain their identities, in their struggle against or in power associations with others. In this sense, the issue of “who one is” and its intrinsic relation to plurality constitutes a central feature of Arendt’s theory of the political, in its descriptive as well as in its normative aspects. So far, so good. But does this mean conversely that we need the political and the public realm for being persons as such – or, at least, “full persons”? A differentiated answer to this question will be necessary.

Draft; the ultimate version will be published in:
Political Phenomenology. Experience, Ontology, Episteme.
Thomas Bedorf / Steffen Herrmann (eds.). London/New York: Routledge 2019.
Please cite accordingly. Thank you!

Is there an ideal for inter-human relations? What I mean is not ideals, but an ideal, or rather the Ideal for inter-human relations in general. For many in contemporary social and political philosophy, as well as in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory this way of putting a question may sound strange, if not blatantly absurd. How can we possibly talk of something like “The Ideal for inter-human relations in general”? Talking about ideals is talking about ‘the good’, and that, we have learned, is an issue on which there are many views and no perspective from which to adjudicate between them. The received view in liberal political philosophy after Rawls has been that the state should remain neutral on views of the good, or of ‘the good life’ – and the more critical theorists accommodate themselves to liberal political philosophy, the more they are prone to accepting that so should critical theory.  [...]

Die jüngere Forschung zur Philosophischen Anthropologie unterscheidet zwischen der Anthropologie als philosophischer Disziplin und als philosophischer Denkrichtung. In die anthropologische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Personbegriff sind beide Perspektiven einzubeziehen, da sie auf verschiedene Weise als Rahmen für die Personthematik fungieren (1.). In der Vermittlung dieser Rahmen im Rückgriff auf Helmuth Plessner argumentiere ich für die These, dass Personalität die Lebensform des Menschen ist (2.). Um die These konkreter zu fassen, erörtere ich dann die strukturellen Grundbestimmungen der menschlichen Lebensform (3.), und zwar in individualanthropologischer (3.1) sowie in sozial- bzw. kulturanthropologischer Hinsicht (3.2).

Humanity is on the threshold of recognizing the fundamental error in its view of life and death. Both death as well as active life is necessary to the vital formation of a larger, more essential whole. In this paper, I apply the sociology of knowledge and change as it pertains to death and focus on ways in which we can step outside its traditional frameworks and limitations. I also discuss topics related to death such as birth, aging, sickness, and war, and examine cultural differences in attitudes toward death. I offer varying perspectives including the Buddhist view and from these draw implications and conclusions. I apply the lenses of contemporary social scientists such as Edgar Morin, Kenneth Gergen, Edward Stewart, Milton Bennett, Mary Catherine Bateson, E. Doyle McCarthy, Philip Slater, and Piotr Sztompka. To these I add other relevant passages from the writings and speeches of key thinkers on the topic of death, in particular, Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, and educator, Daisaku Ikeda. To construct a more humanistic and sustainable view of life, it is first of all crucial to establish a culture which perceives death in its larger living context as but one cycle in the expansive eternity of life.

The specific relationship that living individuals have to their surroundings is often explained in terms of their boundary. Two basic variants of this can be distinguished. While in the first variant the spatial boundary of living individuals, as opposed to merely material bodies, has special function that is essential to the life process, according to the second variant living individuals have a boundary that extends beyond their spatial boundary. The thesis of an extended boundary has been defended in different scientific fields, for instance in recent theoretical biology (R. Dawkins, J. S. Turner) or in recent philosophy of cognition (A. Clark/ D. Chalmers). However, that the thesis in its entire range was already developed in the first half of the 20th century by Nicolai Hartmann is largely unknown. The essay shows how Hartman’s ontology of layers and levels can be used to acquire a conception of the extended boundary of living individuals that integrates organisms in general, animals and human persons in a unified way.

Joseph Ratzinger and Alexander Schmemann, representing West and East respectively, share similar views of personhood and freedom. This similarity is evidenced both in their constructive construal of Christian freedom, and their destructive dismantling of secular freedom. According to both theologians, Christian freedom is grounded in a relational anthropology in which the human person images God's relational freedom as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In contrast, secular understandings of freedom place freedom in antinomic relationship with authority. In other words, Christian freedom is ontological, and secular freedom is ‘external’. There are differences between Ratzinger and Schmemann, yet the differences do not divide. This essay concludes that their various emphases are brought together via the three-fold office of Christ—prophet, priest, and king—to provide a robust and ecumenical expression of Christian freedom.

This chapter will focus on the importance of intersubjective attitudes of recognition for the basic structures of the life-form of human persons. The first section lays out three constitutive facts about this life-form which apply in all human societies. The basic idea defended in the chapter is that to be a person is to be a member of the life-form, and this means more concretely to participate in the life-activities determined by the three constitutive facts. In order to participate in these activities one needs to be included in them by the other participants, and their attitudes of intersubjective recognition are the main way by which such inclusion takes place. To be included is constitutive of what I call the intersubjective status-layer of full-fledged personhood, or of being a person in intersubjective status, and this is the topic of the second section of the chapter.  On the other hand, to include others by having intersubjective attitudes of recognition towards them is a central constituent of the psychological layer of full-fledged personhood, or of being a psychological person—the topic of the third section. Finally, the fourth section briefly discusses the ontology of the life-form of human persons as a ‘fundamental ethics’, addresses two questions concerning it, and introduces two further layers of full-fledged personhood--the institutional and the moral.

Since John Locke, regnant conceptions of personhood in Western philosophy have focused on individual capabilities for complex forms of consciousness that involve cognition such as the capability to remember past events and one’s own past actions, to think about and identify oneself as oneself, and/or to reason. Conceptions of personhood such as this one qualify as cognition-oriented, and they often fail to acknowledge the role of embodiment for personhood. This article offers an alternative conception of personhood from within the tradition of phenomenology of the body. The article presents a phenomenological analysis of joint musical activity in dementia care and outlines an intercorporeal conception of personhood based on this analysis. It also provides a philosophical basis for the idea that others can hold us in personhood and it questions a strict one-body-one-person logic that has pertained in much personhood debate.

In this article, I argue that rights-based claims deriving from the experience of disability have to be understood from the perspective of relational forms of personhood grounded in the developmental and embodied specificities of impairment. I draw
on an anthropological tradition of the critique of individualism and development of models of relational personhood grounded in the analysis of kinship-based social systems, with a particular focus on the work of Marilyn Strathern. I focus on the substantive contexts of care, therapy and cure as sites of contestation between
activists and parents, which expose a dialectical relationship between rights and personhood with implications for an understanding of agency. I also consider these as moments in the unfolding lives of those diagnosed with a disability.

Since ancient times, philosophers have pondered the question of what it means to be a person. David Hume observed that we cannot say much definitively about our world because we do not have other worlds with which to compare it. (Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 30) This is especially true about intelligent life because we know of only one intelligent species: us. Science fiction, because it can step outside our ordinary world, can show us who we as humans are. This is especially so when it shows humans interacting with aliens. Science fiction can at least speculate on what alien worlds and alien intelligences are like and give us ways to contemplate our own humanity and what it means to be a person.

Die Philosophie der Person tritt mit dem Anspruch an, unser Selbstverständnis als Individuen artikulieren zu wollen. Wird die gängige Lesart von Personen als rationalen, selbstbewussten Individuen diesem Anspruch wirklich gerecht? In Auseinandersetzung mit unterschiedlichen Ansätzen der Gegenwart arbeitet Moritz von Kalckreuth neben der rationalen auch die leibliche, emotionale und soziokulturelle Dimension von Personalität heraus und fragt nach der Möglichkeit, sie alle in einem „Syntheseversuch“ zusammenzuführen. Im Anschluss an Helmuth Plessners Philosophische Anthropologie, Nicolai Hartmanns Neue Ontologie und Max Schelers Phänomenologie lassen sich verschiedene Lesarten von Geist gewinnen, die sich für eine solche Verknüpfung der einzelnen Dimensionen von Personalität besonders eignen.

This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the well-known case of mobile money but also the emerging use of smartphone apps, payment tills, digital credit services, and digital fund-raising computer programs. Development professionals have explicitly feminist goals in bringing digital finance to women in the Global South. In several recent reports, they outline the belief that gender norms are a barrier to women's use of finance. They hope digital finance will bring women agency and control over money and consequently shift restrictive gender norms. This article offers a critique of these assumptions based on ethnographic conversations, a diary exercise, and network self-portraiture conducted in Kenya in 2016 among both rural farmers and urbanites. Adopting a distributed agency perspective, the ethnographic study demonstrates that Kenyan women and men use digital finance not to seek individual control of their money but to produce themselves as connected and trustworthy members of financial groups and collectivities. Gender norms may not hinder women from finance but rather enhance and deepen women's and men's financial relationships and bring women success in amassing funds.