What Is A Person

Download or read book What Is a Person? written by Christian Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist’s quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive, What Is a Person? offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.

Download or read book What is a Person? written by John M. Rist and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, John M. Rist offers an account of the concept of 'person' as it has developed in the West, and how it has become alien in a post-Christian culture. He begins by identifying the 'mainline tradition' about persons as it evolved from the time of Plato to the High Middle Ages, then turns to successive attacks on it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then proceeds to the 'five ways' in which the tradition was savaged or distorted in the nineteenth century and beyond. He concludes by considering whether ideas from contemporary philosophical movements, those that combine a closer analysis of human nature with a more traditional metaphysical background, may enable the tradition to be restored. A timely book on a theme of universal significance, Rist ponders whether we persons matter, and how we have reached a position where we are not sure whether we do.

Download or read book How to Read a Person Like a Book written by Gerard I. Nierenberg and published by Barnes & Noble Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique program teaches listeners how to "decode" and reply to non-verbal signals from friends and business associates when those signals are often vague and thus frequenly ignored

Download or read book What Is a Person? written by Michael F. Goodman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea for an anthology on personhood grew out of two things, viz. , the work I did with Martin Benjamin during the Summer of 1982 at Michigan State University on the question, What is a person?, and the amount of time, effort, and expense required for serious research on the topic itself. The former experience taught me the importance of, among other things, attempting to get clear about what we are to mean by 'person,' while the latter experience suggested a possible course of action whereby getting clear might be made more manage able simply by having relatively convenient access to some of the most insightful and stimulating writings on the topic. The problems of personhood addressed in this book are central to issues in ethics ranging from the treatment or termination of infants with birth defects to the question whether there can be rational suicide. But before questions on such issues as the morality of abortion, genetic engineering, infanticide, and so on, can be settled, the prob lems of personhood must be clarified and analyzed. Hence What Is a Person? has as its primary theme the examination of various proposed conditions of personhood.

Download or read book Reasons and Persons written by Derek Parfit and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1986-01-23 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.

Download or read book What is a Person? written by James William Walters and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By providing a much-needed religious/philosophical context for the discussion - examining contemporary thinking on just what constitutes valuable life - Walters broadens his inquiry beyond the human to include other animals and also deals with the phenomenon of anencephalic infants, those who are born without higher brains.

Download or read book What is a Person? written by John M. Rist and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how the concept of person developed from both non-Christian and Christian sources and the ensuing impact of post-Christian culture. This book considers whether we have rights as persons, whether we 'matter', and how we have reached a position where we are not sure whether we do.