Persons
Introduction
This entry is on personhood and the general philosophical question that will be treated is: What is a person? Common use of the term person makes reference to adult human beings. Typical examples of sentences in which this term is used are: "Descartes is the person most responsible for inaugurating the Modern Period in Western thought"; "No person can be President of the United States unless he/she was born in the United States"; and "Human fetuses may be considered persons." As the controversial last example should make clear, the term person is not used exclusively to refer to adult human beings. In much of the literature on persons, the term is used in a non-species-specific way. Many authors take human being to be a term of biology and leave the definition to science. Given that, here is a restatement of the initial question: What must a being be like to be a person?
There are many categories into which the term person fits. People refer to social persons, moral persons, metaphysical persons, legal persons, religious persons, and so on. While no one category of personhood can be considered the correct category, philosophers have tended to concentrate on either the metaphysical or the moral aspects of personhood.
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