Defining Personhood

“If green gas on the moon speaks to an astronaut, how do we know if it’s a person?”
–Peter Ossorio

Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept maps the common ground of behavioral science. The absence of a shared foundation has given us fragmentation, a siloed state of psychological theory and practice. And the science? The integrity of choice, accountability, reason, and intention are necessary commitments at the cornerstone of civilization and any
person-centered psychotherapy, but when taught along with a “scientific” requirement for reductionism and determinism, reside in contradictory intellectual universes. Peter Ossorio developed the Person Concept to remedy these problems. This book is an introduction to his
work and the community of scientists, scholars, and practitioners of Descriptive Psychology.

Ossorio offered these maxims that capture the discipline’s spirit:
1. The world makes sense, and so do people. They make sense to begin with.
2. It’s one world. Everything fits together. Everything is related to everything else.
3. Things are what they are and not something else instead.
4. Don’t count on the world being simpler than it has to be.

The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept of interdependent component concepts: Individual Persons; Behavior as Intentional Action; Language and Verbal Behavior; Community and Culture; and World and Reality. Descriptive Psychology uses preempirical, theory-neutral formulations and methods, to make explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. The goal is a framework with a place for what is already known with room for what is yet to be found.

Key Features
• Provides a way to compare theories, coordinate empirical findings, and negotiate competent disagreement
• Offers guidance for effective case formulation and integration of therapies
• Explores the dilemmas of personhood and the complexities of human and nonhuman action, investigating “what is a person, and how can we be sure?”
• Follows the implications of Hedonics, Prudence, Ethics, and Aesthetics as intrinsic perspectives and reasons for action
• Applies these concepts to personality and social dynamics, consciousness, relationship change, emotional behavior, deliberation, and judgment
• Provides a guide to establishing and restoring empathy––especially when it’s difficult

There is a growing number of objections to the possibility and the practical use of personhood and theories based on it, particularly in bioethics. Chief on this attack has been the suspicion that many in the philosophical literature have expressed about the concept of person, both in its metaphysical and moral aspects. The charges leveled against this concept by different authors from different theoretical standpoints fall into four groups which I shall first try to discriminate – in doing so, I will count the over-simplification charge, the charge of vagueness/ambiguity, the cover-up/begging the question charge, and the irrelevance/superfluousness charge (I will use Bert Gordijn’s (1999)
basic formulations of the charges, subsuming under the former many other similar objections from other authors). It is my claim that we can answer all the charges in a non-problematic way, since most of these are unjustified or, at least, they could equally well be applied to many other concepts who play a fundamental role in philosophy, science, and in our own practical life.
My ultimate interest, however, is not so much on the objections
themselves but on showing how they all share a deeper metaphysical cum moral question - in each charge we will
inevitably reach the point where the metaphysical and the moral aspects of personhood meet and that link is what will prompts us from one charge to the other, until we finally devote our full attention to the kind of connection there is or should be between metaphysical personhood and moral personhood (or, to frame it in another possible manner, the link between the descriptive and the normative aspects of the concept of person).

What does it mean to be a person? The designation of personhood is given to those entities who have moral and/or legal status, and the significance of the designation varies depending on whether one is contemplating metaphysical, moral, or legal personhood. In this era of exponential technological advances, our previous understandings and worldviews are challenged ; we are witness to the creation of new life-forms and the interconnectedness of current life-forms. The lines between persons and property are becoming increasingly blurry. There are at least three major areas in which technology is challenging and even forcing us to reconsider traditional notions of personhood: fetal personhood, animal rights, and human-machine mergers.

In the midst of the plurality of religion, globalization, and secularization of human society. The researcher contended that only the Christian transcendental view of personhood gives a true, intelligible, and coherent explanation of personhood that gives hope to humanity. The researcher achieved this through a critical analysis of the Islamic theological view of personhood using a biblical and theological framework of covenantal apologetics. The paper is divided into three major parts. The first section discussed the Islamic theological view of personhood (ITP); by looking at the Islamic view of creation, fall, redemption. Secondly, the Christian theological view of personhood (CTVP) discusses the Biblical theological view of Personhood (BTP); by examining the Christian view of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Thirdly, a theological analysis of ITP from the lenses of BTVP: This section applies the Christian theological view of personhood established in section two to do a critical analysis of the Islamic view of personhood for clarity, awareness, and trustworthiness (CAT); Lastly, observations and recommendations integrated into the main body of the paper. This research is significant because understanding the CTVP provides a guide to developing an apologetic and evangelistic strategy for engaging Muslim communities in Northern Nigeria and beyond the gospel of hope and transformation.

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.

In this article, I focus on the ways advertising language has helped precipitate the idea of corporate personhood, and how corporate 10.1353/bio.2014.0013personality has come to supplant human personality in particular aspects of U.S. culture. Corporations use advertising to create an impersonal persona to convince people they have a relationship with the things (products) they buy. Drawing on Sharon Cameron’s work regarding impersonality in a somewhat different context, I argue that the mechanisms of advertising, which simulate and manipulate human emotions and relations, are intertwined with the creation of corporate personhood and corporate biography. While noting that the concept is fluid, Cameron proposes that “representations of the impersonal suspend, eclipse and even destroy the idea of the person as such, who is not treated as a social, political or individual entity” (ix). In addition to the “nonhuman” attributes Cameron identifies with the impersonal, I would add, in the context of corporate personhood, the mechanical, generic, and parasitic: that is, impersonal systems function as simulacra of the personal and siphon personal qualities from people or imitate human processes (x). Advertising, the corporate speech I depict as impersonal and depersonalizing, provides a primary register for creating corporate “autobiographies,” which I define as the networks of representation that reify corporations as coherent and personalized entities, rather than treat them as legal fabrications. As one would expect in a zero-sum game, these issues related to advertising, language, and corporations are intimately connected—one can’t apprehend the corporate person separately from the corporate language of advertising. I argue that, though it is mediated, advertising is the most (quasi-)autobiographical utterance a corporation can make; most biographical representations of a “corporation” embody and ratify it as a coherent entity.

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.

What does it mean to be a person? The designation of personhood is given to those entities who have moral and/or legal status, and the significance of the designation varies depending on whether one is contemplating metaphysical, moral, or legal personhood. In this era of exponential technological advances, our previous understandings and worldviews are challenged ; we are witness to the creation of new life-forms and the interconnectedness of current life-forms. The lines between persons and property are becoming increasingly blurry. There are at least three major areas in which technology is challenging and even forcing us to reconsider traditional notions of personhood: fetal personhood, animal rights, and human-machine mergers.

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.

The aim of this paper is to argue that the best way to understand most of the questions raised by Personal Identity Online (PIO) is to drop the assumption that it is simply a special case of the more general and well-known Personal Identity (PI) problem and that, as such, one can resort to standard PI approaches to explain PIO.
I argue that this assumption be dropped because standard approaches to PI often fail to recognize that many of the questions they address are not Strict PI (SPI) issues (i.e. questions about the persistence of persons in time) but different philosophical problems related to (and in some sense even dependent on) the concept of the person and the most fundamental problem of the conditions of personhood.
Having described the different philosophical problems related to the concept of the person and argued that personhood is the fundamental problem to be addressed, I then proceed to substantiate that claim with regards to online situations, examining a number of them (e.g. social network profiles, bloggers’ profiles, avatars, etc.) in the light of this methodological classification. I argue that, in most cases, online situations are on a par with offline situations (some taken from everyday life; some from PI’s well-known thought experiments) and that the answer to be given depends on what exactly the situation and its features are.
Building on this, I finish the paper with a discussion of how successfully certain existing approaches to PI can be applied to online situations. Specifically, I claim that psychological approaches to the PI problem may be better equipped to deal with most of online situations than their somatic counterparts. I also claim that, within the wider range of psychological approaches, narrative theories can provide a reasonable starting point to assess online situations.

NICOSIA 2018 ii STUDIES IN MEDITERRANEAN ARCHAEOLOGY Volume CXLIX Founded by Paul Åström The publication of this volume has been funded by the Irish Research Council Cover image: Spoleto. Piazza d'Armi. Tomb 11 (infant, 2-4 years). Detail of a shoe-shaped askos of brown impasto with a depiction of the 'Mistress of animals' (after a drawing by J. Weidig)

Artificial agents such as robots are performing increasingly significant ethical roles in society. As a result, there is a growing literature regarding their moral status, with many suggesting it is justified to regard manufactured entities as having intrinsic moral worth. However, the question of whether artificial agents could have the high degree of moral status that is attributed to human persons has largely been neglected. To address this question I develop a respect-based account of the ethical criteria for the moral status of persons. From this account I derive an empirical test that must be passed in order for artificial agents to be considered alongside persons as having the corresponding rights and duties.

Se argumenta aquí que es parte de nuestro concepto de 'persona' que las personas deben ser, por su naturaleza, aptas para 'endurar' en el tiempo. En ninguna concepción de las personas como entidades que 'perduran' , con diferentes partes temporales para diferentes tiempos, o como secuen-cias de etapas que se encuentran entre sí en la relación de 'ser un supervi-viente de' , es posible hacer inteligibles algunas de nuestras intuiciones normativas acerca de las personas. Se argumenta también que la teoría psicológica tradicional de la identidad personal es insostenible. La continuidad psicológica parece ser ni suficiente, ni necesaria para la identidad personal. Una concepción razonable de las personas parece ser o bien, una forma de 'animalismo' en donde las personas son organismos biológicos, o una teoría en la que las personas son sustancias primitivas, con condiciones de identidad también primitivas.

Recording of my talk can be heard here: https://www.humanephilosophy.com/single-post/2013/10/16/HPP-2013-Jonathan-Price-Human-Beings-as-Persons-in-Law-

It seems that not so long ago something happened to the concept 'person' as the result of which it has become difficult for it to connote what was legally and historically one of its most common senses: a corporate person (for instance, that of Hobbes's Leviathan). I shall trace some of the movements of the concept of 'person', from its Greek theatrical beginnings, its Roman law days, its theological developments in Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, Grotius's and Hobbes's dealings with it and up to the present day. This sketch will identify certain ideas and concepts that have been rolled into what we now mean by 'person', as well as where they may have come from.

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me -ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness.

Der Artikel versucht, drei Begriffe zu klären, den der Person, den des Selbst und den des Ich, und zwar aus der Perspektive der Handlungstheorie; zur Entscheidung der verbleibenden offenen Fragen wird zudem auf eine Rekonstruktion der Ontogenese des Personen- und Selbstbegriffs rekurriert. In der Handlungstheorie wird der Personenbegriff an zwei zentralen Stellen verwendet: Personen sind die Subjekte von Handlungen; und Personen sind Objekte von Handlungen mindestens in dem Sinne, daß Handelnde meist u.a. darauf zielen, sich selbst Vorteile zu verschaffen. Aus den Bedingungen dieser beiden Funktionen des Personenbegriffs ergibt sich schon der größte Teil seiner Definition. Allerdings bleiben noch einige Parameter offen, vor allem zu den Bedingungen der diachronen Personenkontinuität. Diese werden durch eine Rekonstruktion der Ontogenese des Selbstbegriffs und die sich dabei zeigende Verwobenheit von Körper und Geist geklärt, wobei hier unter “Selbst” die Person aus der Perspektive des jeweiligen Subjekts verstanden wird. Der traditionelle Handlungsbegriff unterstellt, daß in Handlungen (meistens) der Körper von einem mentalen Kern der Person gesteuert wird, der das innere Subjekt ist. Dieser mentale Kern wird hier “Ich” genannt. Z.T. unter Rückgriff auf Elemente des Freudschen Ich-Begriffs, z.T. durch eine handlungstheoretische Analyse wird schließlich ein handlungstheoretischer Ich-Begriff festgelegt.

Presentation on the realm of everyday life among Kosovo Serbs and restoration of "good personhood" in the de facto enclave of Velika Hoca, Kosovo, at the International Conference "Languages, Communities and Identities. An Interdisciplinary Perspective" at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia - Bulgaria.

My approach to the topic of social personhood is to ask what it is to be a person. I begin from the position that personhood is inherently social, that being a person entails interacting with other persons. But to say that personhood is social does not indicate what personhood or being a person is. The argument I present is that a person is constituted by means of the dynamic relationship between an individual human and society that constitutes an individual's practical identity or personhood. Individual humans are embedded in a constellation of relations between the society's members and social institutions. Each individual human occupies a particular social situatedness within the constellation of human relations, and, accordingly, individuals' experiences of personhood, and the persons they are, are constituted by their social relations and situatedness. A person is constituted through interacting with other persons; however, individuals, though deeply influenced by society, are more than mere cogs in a social machine. I think that the contribution individuals make to their own social personhood needs greater emphasis and clarification and that we need to base our account of social personhood on individuals as active, thoughtful beings, rather than on abstract cultural processes. What I will outline in this paper is not a firm division between those aspects of personhood produced by society and those aspects produced by the individual but how there is a dynamic of how individuals constitute their personhood through their relations and actions.

Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman matches its rhetoric to its argument by highlighting anxiety in its cybernetic subjects as we face the prospect of disembodied humanity. Medievalists should be sympathetic since embodiment is key to the conception of full medieval personhood. Hayles reacted against a new desire to loosen the link of person to body and much speculative thinking continues to push in this direction. As contemporary science fiction shows, we can conceive a variety of technological advances that might allow intelligence to exist electronically and humans to become increasingly independent of their bodies. While some form of materiality and localized perspective seem necessary, in the future a person will be identified less by materiality or information than by understanding. The ability to recognize a being as a durable, comprehensible interlocutor will be the litmus test of the posthuman being.

This book tests the explanatory and descriptive power of the doctrine of sin in relation to two concrete situations: sexual abuse of children and the holocaust. Taking seriously the explanatory power of secular discourses for analysing and regulating therapeutic action in relation to such situations, the book asks whether the theological language of sin can offer further illumination by speaking of God and the world together. Through its discussion of abuse and the holocaust, an engagement with Augustine, original sin and feminism, a fresh and sometimes surprising perspective is offered, both on the theology of sin and on the pathologies under consideration. The understanding of sin that emerges is centred on joyful worship of the trinitarian God. This essay is more systematic and more theological than most practical, pastoral or applied theology and more practical and concrete than most systematic or constructive theology. It is a genuinely concrete, systematic theology.

This article discusses the basic philosophical and legal standards applied to defining the existential status of two artificial androids, the golem and the homunculus, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when their creation was actually considered possible and often believed to be an accomplished fact. It will also show how the historical definition of personhood has generally coincided with Aristotle’s notions, which he provides mainly to determine who is worthy of slavery. These sorts of historical stances on personhood are important because they elucidate the difficult social precedents facing any redefinition of non-human personhood today.” This paper was given at the Conference on Personhood Beyond the Human, Yale University, Dec. 6-8, 2013. It is a somewhat revised excerpt from my book Androids and intelligent networks in early modern literature and culture: artificial slaves (New York: Routledge, 2013), and is used with permission of the publisher. Before deciding how to ...

Dehumanization seems to be a feature in particularly egregious abuses such as genocide, eugenics, gendered violence, and slavery. Recent philosophical analyses have examined what, if anything, distinguishes dehumanization from other instances of discriminatory attitudes or social injustice. Most existing accounts focus on animalization and objectification. By the criteria of these accounts, cognitively disabled people are clearly dehumanized - yet they are often ignored or expressly excluded from consideration. Additionally, the solutions sometimes suggested for resisting or combatting dehumanization encounter specific challenges because of the vexed issue of personhood and cognitive disability.

This seminar sets out an analysis of dehumanization which includes cognitively disabled people, and presents infantilization as a further, unexplored process of dehumanization. Drawing on feminist philosophy and philosophy of disability, existing theories of dehumanization, and empirical work on infantilization and cognitive disability, I argue that - as with other processes of dehumanization - the infantilization of cognitively disabled people is both a social injustice and a conceptual failure.

Economic hardship in Africa necessitates anew, an agitation and a reconsideration of the issue of reparation. Reparation has some shades of meaning. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines reparation as: first, the "money that is paid by a country that has lost a war, for the damage, injuries, etc. that it has caused" to others and, second, an "act of giving something to somebody or doing something for them in order to show that you are sorry for suffering that you have caused" them. In these definitions, reparation is taken to be synonymous with compensation. A critical look at these definitions, however, indicates largely that it is somewhat lopsided. The meaning of reparation, in this sense, involves compensation; yet monetary compensation, whatsoever the amount, can hardly be commensurately used to remedy the lives of those who died during slavery or any other event that necessitated a people's demand for reparation.

Marya Schechtman's 'Narrative Self-Constitution View' proposes that for some conscious entity to be a person they must have a narrative self-conception. I argue, however, that Schechtman's seemingly intuitive criteria for personhood are too narrow, given my own experiences and phenomenology as a person with an 'episodic' temporal temperament. I draw on Galen Strawson's paper 'Against Narrativity' to defend my view that there can exist persons who perceive themselves to be entirely without a cohesive narrative at all, and go on to argue that it is both unethical and unintuitive to deny these kinds of people personhood. In my positive thesis I propose that it may be possible to argue that selves must be capable of local narrativity to be considered persons, but that we should reject the requirement of global narrativity for selfhood on the basis that it is contrary to our accepted world view of who constitutes a person.

En este artículo defiendo que el concepto de persona no puede ser reducido al concepto de sujeto o de “animal humano” (Olson), sino que debe incluir una serie de rasgos biológicos, culturales, normativos y prácticos que trascienden cualquier tipo de conceptualización reduccionista. Propongo, además, una serie de requisitos que deberían satisfacerse para que un individuo pudiera ser considerado una persona. Finalmente, señalo la importancia de afrontar desde una nueva perspectiva la relación entre el problema de la identidad personal y el concepto de persona.

Augmented cognition, like so many new technologies, has its promises and its perils. Whereas recent literature in ethics focuses on the military origins and applications of augmented cognition and harnessing the power of a symbiotic brain-nervous system-computer system for warfare, this article analyzes this technology for applications in health care settings and research. Additionally, a delineation of how law and policy makers might respond to issues in shared culpability and responsibility is proposed.

All languages and cultures appear to have one or more “mind-like” constructs that supplement the human body. Linguistic evidence suggests they all have a word for someone, and another word for body, but that doesn’t mean that whatever else makes up a human being (i.e. someone) apart from the body is the same everywhere. Nonetheless, the (Anglo) mind is often reified and thought of in universal terms. This volume adds to the literature that denounces such reification. It looks at Japanese, Longgu (an Oceanic language), Thai and Old Norse/Icelandic, spelling out, in a culturally neutral natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) how their “mind-like” constructs differ from the Anglo mind.

Augmented cognition, like so many new technologies, has its promises and its perils. Whereas recent literature in ethics focuses on the military origins and applications of augmented cognition and harnessing the power of a symbiotic brain-nervous system-computer system for warfare, this article analyzes this technology for applications in health care settings and research. Additionally, a delineation of how law and policy makers might respond to issues in shared culpability and responsibility is proposed.

Introduction: Modern Heritage and the Puzzle about Persons in Medical Practice

Hans Jonas has broken new ground in the history of Gnosticism and modernity, medical ethics, and philosophical biology.  He has been embraced by people on the political left and others on the political right.  Our presentation draws on his interpretation of modernity and his attempt in his philosophical biology to provide a new path out of some of the dead-ends of modernity. As Jonas knew, these concerns have a direct bearing on how we think about medicine.

Modern medicine has enjoyed much success by drawing on those sciences which study the most elementary components of living beings, namely, the sciences of physics, chemistry, genetics, and others.  There can be no doubt that these basic sciences do and will play large roles in helping to explain and treat diseases and injuries of various kinds.  However, such sciences fall far short in providing for medical practitioners, especially clinicians, a conception of the patient as a living human self that is needed for the practical purposes of healthcare.

Approaches to this Puzzle

In its approach this chapter is divided into two main sections: historical background and conditions for life. The two sections are continuous with one another by drawing on the philosophy of living beings developed by Hans Jonas. 

In historical background , we shall briefly sketch the history of modern conceptions of human life which lead to our present-day puzzlement. This sketch will lead to the recognition of the mind/body problem as the persistent intellectual framework from which we still have not succeeded in escaping.  As the new sciences of nature emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, a philosophical framework for trying to unify the ever-expanding multiplicity of theories and concepts took shape.  This framework consisted in a hierarchy of the sciences, each higher level science being theoretically dependent upon the concepts and laws of sciences of the lower levels. This hierarchy of the sciences, however, gave rise to an attempt to simplify them all by proposing an all-encompassing naturalism, the philosophy that all the sciences would (and must) someday be reduced to physics. Reductionistic naturalism has never proven to fully satisfy the modern mind, however; and consequently the mind/body dualism persisted to thwart attempts to see living beings – human beings in particular – as unified wholes. Present-day efforts in medicine to make overall sense of the patient as a person thus encounters road blocks.

In this second part of the chapter, we seek to lay out conditions for being alive that are found in both the mental and the more physical dimensions of life. These conditions are the following: (1) the necessity for living individuals to constantly act in order to sustain their ongoing existence; (2) the separateness of the individual living being from its environment while at the same time maintaining an openness to the environment and engaging in transactions with it; (3) the necessity for the organism to undergo constant change while always making a sameness of self throughout this change; (4) the directedness of the organism’s activity toward its own future being, hence the teleological orientation of organic processes; (5) the origin of feelings in higher life forms. These five conditions of life can serve as a framework within a unified conception of the person which for the purposes of medicine includes both the more physical and the more mental dimensions of patients.

On the verge of technological breakthroughs, which define and revolutionize our understanding of intelligence, cognition, and personhood, especially when speaking of artificial intelligences and mind uploads, one must consider the legal implications of granting personhood rights to artificial intelligences or emulated human entities.

Robert J. Lifton is an interesting author. He is a psychologist who utilizes his patient interviews the way an anthropologist does, drawing generalizations and tendencies out of the individual and applying them to the cultural. The main theme of this book is the “ ...

This paper explores the everyday experiences, perceptions, and practices of Kosovo Serbs residing in the rural fabric of Southeast Kosovo with regard to security-related issues. Building on previous qualitative social research conducted in Central Kosovo, it particularly investigates how local responses of ordinary Serbs reflect a certain pragmatic performativity in the face of Kosovo Albanians. In-depth interviews and focus groups were held with locals, while field observation was conducted to construct locally nuanced knowledge about the relations between ordinary Serbs, their identity, and the surrounding landscape. Similar to the Central Kosovo study’s findings, the results confirm that in Southeast Kosovo, local Serbs neither displayed nor unfolded forms of vernacularism or disloyalty toward Kosovo Albanians. Conversely, they were found reflecting on potential creative solutions for tackling poverty and underdevelopment in the hope of avoiding replications of post-1999 Kosovo War ideologies emanated by respective national media coverages and political rhetoric. Moreover, it is argued that security experts have de facto overlooked untapped processes of present-day interethnic coexistence and resilience between Serbs and Albanians in the rural fabric by largely giving salience to the tense atmosphere in the Serb-majority urban clusters of North Kosovo. In fact, results also show that Kosovo Serbs pragmatically perform an account of quotidian practices for restoring a sense and self-image of ‘personhood’ in the eyes of the ‘ethnic other’. Employing a research approach that aimed at avoiding unnecessary ethnicisation, this paper sheds light on a peace potential and true civic
responsibility that emerged spontaneously from Kosovo Serb voices.
Overall, the paper lays the ground for debating the notion of ‘personhood’ as a lens through which to unravel inconspicuous yet present interethnic coexistence in post-conflict Kosovo.

What do we mean when we refer to world? How does the world relate to the human person? Are the two interdependent and, if so, in what way? What does world mean for an ethnographer or an anthropologist? Much has been said of worlds and worldviews, but do we really know what we mean by these words? Asking these questions and many more, this book explores the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture, and how these shed light on the relationship between humans and the world in the midst of which they find themselves.

As Pina-Cabral shows, recent decades have seen important shifts in the way we relate human thought to human embodiment—the relation between how we think and what we are. The book proposes a novel approach to the human condition: an anthropological outlook that is centered around the notions of personhood and sociality. Through a rich confrontation with ethnographic and historical material, this work contributes to the ongoing task of overcoming the theoretical constraints that have hindered anthropological thinking over the past century.