Exploring Personhood

Exploring Personhood examines the metaphysical underpinnings of theories of human nature, personhood, and the self. The history of western philosophy provides the framework for broaching critical questions pertinent to these three topics. The book explores philosophical anthropology on its most foundational level, with a focus on the basic constituents of the unified self. The coverage of the work is broad in scope, moving from the Pre-Socratics to Postmodernism, critically assessing what transpired during the intervening 2500 year period, but with special attentiveness to the contributions of the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition of inquiry. While each chapter can stand on its own, they collectively reveal a developing story that finds expression in diverse attempts to come to terms with what it means to be human, and how we understand ourselves as persons. This book is designed to meet the needs of a wide range of readers, from beginners to more advanced students.

With the dawn of research into leader-behaviors, scholars differentiated between being task-oriented, which is important, and also being people-oriented. People matter. And we tend to guard against leader attitudes that treat persons as objects, as passive or inert, as instruments, as so much clay to be shaped and molded. Hannah Arendt (1958) rejected the idea that leadership is like work, in which a craftsman picks up the raw materials and the requisite tools in order to create a product according to an image in his head. No, she said, leadership is social action in which we all participate, each with his or her unique and creative spontaneity, collaborating in an erratic cascade toward the future. Leadership is something people do together. And to achieve that vision, we must acknowledge each other as persons and not as figures in a ledger or pieces on a chessboard. This volume is intended as a call to be curious about what we take for granted as individuals, educators, and leaders. In essence to ask ourselves the more difficult questions about who we are as we recognize our need for others within a community? What does it mean to be a person and to recognize another’s personhood? Nathan Harter (2021) draws us into a space to dialogue with ourselves about the notion of personhood as leaders. “So, what does it mean to be a person? And what does it mean to treat someone as a person? What does anyone owe another person?” (p. 4). In what way then do leaders contend with such questions as they are becoming; becoming better leaders, becoming better individuals, becoming their sacred selves. A person-centered ethic would be universal in scope, yet adapted to local conditions that many leaders must deal with on a daily basis. Nearly every religion already addresses both what it means to become a person and what one owes a person ethically, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or other affiliation. Regardless if organizations deal directly with the notion of personhood, leaders deal with the workplace challenges of which the human bring him or her entire self to the unit. Hence, a comprehensive and integrate context forces us to revisit our assumptions about who exactly is a person and what they might deserve. This volume would bring those voices into conversation. In addition, we intend to complicate the question by extending similar questions into emerging areas of increasing relevance in a technological age that crosses geographic boundaries, such as online presences, corporate entities, and the prospects of Artificial Intelligence. If anything, an expanded interdisciplinary and global context makes this volume relevant and timely for leaders and leadership studies across multiple fields of study and professions.

In 21st century America, personhood is under daily assault, sometimes with dire consequences. Scientist, ethicist, and ordained minister Craig C. Malbon encourages the reader to consider such assaults on personhood endured by victims of abortion, ageism, Alzheimer’s disease, drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, gender, gender orientation, racism, sexual preference, identity politics, and our will-to-power over the “other.” In exploring personhood status, Malbon poses difficult questions for us. Is personhood assigned as all-or-nothing, or is it a sliding scale based upon criteria arbitrarily aimed at our vulnerabilities? Does the voiceless embryo and fetus have advocates who can speak to the moral question of abortion? Is the personhood of an economically insecure pregnant woman degraded to the point where lack of access to early termination of pregnancy results in “coercive childbearing?” Does being a member of the LGBTQI+ community target one for assaults on personhood, to the extreme of being killed? In delving into the biology and psychology of assaults of “self” upon the “other,” Malbon sees powerful linkages of everyday assaults on personhood to darker, profound “original sins” that are foundational to the rise of the American empire, i.e., assaults on the indigenous Native Americans and assaults derivative to the institution of slavery upon Africans, African Americans, and their descendants.

In a growing secular society, what distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian? Is a Christian identified by certain religious and ceremonial activity, social action, principles, or do their relationships identify them as Christian? This book suggests that a Christian person is in a continual relationship with the Triune God through the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, this living relationship reflects the eternal relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because people have been created in the image and likeness of the Triune God. This book uses historical, theological, philosophical, and biblical approaches to understand the Christian person. Throughout this book, the reader will be engaged with the modern Greek theologian, John Zizioulas. However, this book is a study on the person of the Holy Spirit, though never separated from the trinitarian relationship, who makes a human person a Christian.

A remarkable and moving cross-genre work about animal rights by one of America’s foremost experimental writers Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. This book provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities.

"This book examines the legal realities which are emerging from Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) or virtual worlds that demonstrate many of the traits we associate with the Earth world: interpersonal relationships, economic transactions, and organic political institutions"--Provided by publisher.

How does a person experience emotions? What is the relationship between the experiential and biological dimensions of emotions? How do emotions figure in a person's relation to the world and to other people? How do emotions feature in human vulnerability to mental illness? Do they play a significant role in the fragile balance between mental health and illness? If emotions are in fact significant, how are they relevant for treatment? Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. What they are, and how they are related though, is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding this relationship. The authors argue for an account of emotions and personhood that attempts to understand human emotions from the combined approach of philosophy and psychopathology, taking its models particularly from hermeneutical phenomenology and from dialectical psychopathology. Within the book, the authors develop a basic set of concepts for understanding what emotional experience means for a human person, with the assumption that human emotional experience is fragile - a fact which entails vulnerability to mental disturbance. Drawing on research from psychiatry, psychopathology, philosophy, and neuroscience, the book will be valuable for both students and researchers in these disciplines, and more broadly, within the field of mental health.