What is a Person?

John Rist is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Toronto. Author of more than a dozen books and over a hundred articles on ancient philosophy, patristics, and ethics, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Aquinas Medalist of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

• Part I. Constructing the 'Mainline Tradition': 1. The first foundations: Plato and Aristotle; 2. From Stoic individuals and personae to Christian persons; 3. Mixtures: Plotinus, Porphyry, Nemesius; 4. Augustine's personae: theology, metaphysics, history; 5. The definition: Boethius and Richard of Saint Victor; 6. Toward a synthesis: Thomas Aquinas; 7. Between two worlds: Duns Scotus; Part II. No God, No Soul; What Person?: 8. Virtue, 'virtue', rights; 9. Descartes on soul, self, mind, nature; 10. Personal identity from Hobbes to Locke; 11. After Locke; 12. Sympathy or empathy: Richardson, Hume, Smith; 13. Ambiguous Rousseau's soul and 'moi'; 14. Kant's rational autonomy; Part III. Toward Disabling the Person: 15. Introducing the five ways; 16. Assimilation and homogenization; 17. The way of Prometheus; 18. Whistling in the humanitarian wind; 19. Virtual morality: propaganda as social glue; 20. The way to an absolute nihilism; Part IV. Persons Restored or Final Solution?: 21. Parfit and Heidegger; 22. Strawson and Nagel; 23. Personalism, phenomenology, Edith Stein; 24. God made Adam and Eve.

'John M. Rist describes how the 'mainline' understanding of the human person arose, how it became shaken in early modern thinking, and finally shattered in the suspicions of the nineteenth and the nihilism of the twentieth centuries. Using Heidegger as a foil and Edith Stein as a resource, he shows how the mainline tradition can be reaffirmed and even enhanced by its history; he argues that we can do better than 'the ethics of wishful thinking', which some might see as the only option available now. His book is a major contribution to both cultural and philosophical understanding.' Robert Sokolowski, Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy, Catholic University of America