The reader will judge the extent to which I have succeeded in weaving together these diverse selections with continuous thematic threads. My hope is that this book will prove useful to students and teachers of philosophy in a variety of courses in which the concept of the person figures, including courses on the Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Anthropology, and Personal Identity. My goal is to offer a group of stimulating readings that revolve around a single rich, widely debated, and seemingly indefeasible concept. While not disguising preferences, I tried to avoid indulging in idiosyncrasy. It is of course not intended even to approach a comprehensive study. This selection of readings is an attempt to trace in outline one trajectory in the philosophical history of the idea of the person. Consequently, person does not admit of a clumsy, ham-handed semantic reduction to more basic concepts. But while these comprise a constellation of interconnected and sometimes overlapping ideas, each has its own conceptual history, its own distinct evolution. What is a person? The history of this concept (πρόσωπον = prosōpon in Greek, persona in Latin, Person in German, personne in French) is intertwined with the histories of such concepts as human being, individual, soul, subject, self, ego, and mind.
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