3 Answers

  1. This is a great opportunity to talk about complex things – definitions.

    Some of the above is described in more detail here.

    It seems that definitions are easy. Here, for example, is the definition of a triangle. A shape defined by three segments connecting three points that do not lie on the same straight line.�

    But it only seems so. In order for us to ask the question “what is a person”, we must already have the concept of “person”, distinguish it from the reality around us, do not confuse it with a tree, a house and a dog, so that we generally have something to ask, someone to point a finger at – “here is a person, what is he?”. The nature of this intuitive clarity is unclear, but it is possible that this is some kind of innate ontology, an understanding of how to break up the world around us into objects, according to what principles to do this.

    We understand that both the little Chihuahua and the great Dane are dogs, and we do not understand it at all because we have a well-defined dictionary definition of the concept of “dog”in our head. However, many of us may also think about a hyena that it is a dog, and this is a cat-like creature, all of a sudden.

    This is a separate, interesting topic – how this is possible, how it happens, how individual objects and the universals that connect them relate – from attempts to understand this, one of the oldest philosophical disputes, the problem of universals, grows.

    So, a man. It is impossible to give a definition of a person that is universally applicable, complete, consistent and does not reduce to “a person is, ahem, a person“. Or you can, but such a definition will be completely useless-well, that's the truth, why do we need such a definition that would not allow us to confuse people and pillars, do you really need such a definition, and without it you can't do anything, you constantly get into a mess?

    The definition, in theory, should indicate such an essential characteristic of the defined that without having it, we cannot classify something as defined. And what kind of characteristic can a person have? Mind, from the obvious? And what is the mind? Something that only a person has? It looks like we don't know what it is. Do monkeys have it? And the children? And the mad ones? Can you call a racist reasonable? I wouldn't name it, but no one asks me. The” mind ” also has a big problem with intuitive clarity – there are far fewer cases when we can't understand whether a person is in front of us or not, than there are cases when we can't tell whether we are dealing with the mind.

    But maybe it will be possible to sketch something for a specific task? What tasks do we have for such a definition? Offhand – philosophical, legal and biological.

    With biology, everything is simple (for us, ordinary people, and in general it is not at all simple, and many tooth-crushing philosophical works have been written about taxonomy in biology) – there are enough characteristic features that would allow us to distinguish the species homo sapiens sapiens from the total mass of living beings.

    With philosophy, everything is complicated. Everyone has heard about a two-legged animal without feathers – this is just an attempt to create a definition from the minimum necessary words. And everyone knows that the end of the matter was that this definition fell like chickens in the pluck. And no one has yet thought to take a man with his nails pulled out, so that they can attack him from the other side-so we have pulled out our nails and what now, we are not facing a man? And it seems to me that this will be the fate of any essentialist (that is, through the essence) definition of man. I could even say that a person is something that can evade definition. By the way, from here we can get to the question of free will – perhaps a person can be free precisely because he is able to escape. This includes escaping determinism, acting contrary to any prediction precisely because it was predicted so.

    There is another approach-to define a person as the ideal of a person. It is, however, forced to be formulated as ” a person is a person who…”, that is, through recursion, but it is still better. And most importantly-it is clear why. Because a person without an ideal is not a person.

    The existential approach to defining a person is interesting – not through the essence and not through the ideal, but through existence. A person is something that exists, being aware of its existence. It'll do, as long as we don't encounter other civilizations, and then we'll take a look. Or will breakthroughs in biology, philosophy of mind, and neurophysiology allow us to better understand how animals and humans think, and what if chimpanzees are also aware of their existence? And for many people, on the contrary, I would not guarantee that they are aware, so do not deprive them of the title “person”on this basis? Although it stops sounding proud in this situation.

    With law, everything seems complicated for us, but in general it is simple. Jurisprudence solves a simple problem-to draw a boundary between those to whom jurisprudence is applied, the subjects of legal relations and those to whom it is not applied, the objects of legal relations. Well, this border, in fact, is quite conditional. No one is trying to calculate the exact day when the embryo becomes a human, and no one is trying to justify this day either, we just postulated it conventionally. And the age of majority – why does a person become an adult at 18? Because we told him so. And the age of sexual consent. And the moment when we stop considering a person legally alive. And the moment when we deprive him of the right to manage his life, delegating it to other people. It is good when such things do not need a strict justification, because if we suddenly want to demand it , then our entire legal system will fall apart, and why do we need it?

  2. Our modern understanding of man is mainly determined by the knowledge that is represented by the natural sciences. All of them, in fact, are materialistic. From these positions, a person is considered. Where it exists, it is mostly a biological, physical, or natural being. Moreover, they say that a person has a soul, but in all this its ontological status is too undefined, since (it) is not the primary being that, according to them, has everything corporeal and material. And then we have to define its existence as something derived from matter, and not even from all of it, but only from its higher forms. Therefore, we can usually imagine that the soul is definitely comparable to the person himself, that is, to his physical existence. It is limited in its size and power, its existence is limited by time and, of course, in all these parameters, so to speak, it is not comparable to the world. In the course of which the idea arises that it is so small… and its occurrence is random in the universe, like life itself. And then how can such a person be optimistic about the same science, the world, and himself?

    Science and philosophy, which are in the system of idealism, approach a person in a different way. They consider a person, first of all, from the essence of the soul. For it is from the soul that man begins, they believe. In the “soul – body” link, the main thing is the soul. As the ancient Greek philosopher Plato says, the soul rules, the body obeys. According to them, the soul and spirit are primary, and the corporeal and material are secondary. At the same time, they have a clear position: the soul is an essence of a non — corporeal nature, and therefore it has other attributes than all that is corporeal has them. For example, the concept of magnitude does not apply to non-corporeal. Therefore, the human soul is not limited to human corporeality, but goes (along the line of its non-corporeal nature) far,far away into the world, just as the world enters it, and vice versa.

    These thinkers and philosophers also came to understand that the human soul should not be considered as an entity that belongs only to this person or another and arises on the basis of each of them. That shouldn't happen. Because, as they think, each individual soul has its origin from the universal and unified essence of the < universal> soul. They came to this point by reflection, some kind of mental comprehension, and where possible, by intuition…

    After all, mentally observing her, they could not help but notice that she has not just some perfections, but higher ones. Such creatures could not have appeared in the natural world by themselves (as Thomas Aquinas puts it, “the soul is more excellent than the creatures of the body…”). And then they assumed that the soul comes from another area of being — from the intelligible. And there only such perfections should be located. The philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas reminds us: “The divine Essence alone is the perfect likeness of all things, since it is the universal principle of all things.”

    Of course, they also applied the principle and idea of monism. First of all, there must exist in the intelligible realm of being a single soul (archetype), from which and on the model of which all individual human souls originate. It should be noted that this is a strong move and argument on their part.

    Consequently, to the question raised, what is man, the answer must follow: although man is a union of soul and body, but his essence is mainly determined by the soul (“The true man is the soul…”, Proclus, the ancient philosopher), and it occurs, so to speak, as a result of the descent of the one and universal soul into the realm of corporeal existence (“If the soul… (as it is said), it falls into the body and revives it…”, Plotinus, the ancient philosopher) and is, in fact, a union with one or another human (individual) corporeality. This is how the human essence (and its existence) appears. But again, with all that the philosopher Proclus draws our attention to: “Every soul … belongs to the ever-existing and is the first of those born.” And if this is the case, then man begins with it <truly>.…

  3. From the point of view of biological systematics, homo sapiens is a species from the animal kingdom, the sub – kingdom of eumetazoi, the chordate type, the vertebrate subtype (cranial), the infra-type of maxillofacies, the superclass of quadrupeds, the class of mammals, the subclass of animals, the order of primates, the suborder of dry noses, the infra-order of monkeys, the parvotry of narrow noses, the superfamily of apes, the family hominidae, the subfamily hominin, the tribe hominini, subtribes of the hominin genus humans.

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5 Answers

  1. This is a great opportunity to talk about complex things – definitions.

    Some of the above is described in more detail here.

    It seems that definitions are easy. Here, for example, is the definition of a triangle. A shape defined by three segments connecting three points that do not lie on the same straight line.�

    But it only seems so. In order for us to ask the question “what is a person”, we must already have the concept of “person”, distinguish it from the reality around us, do not confuse it with a tree, a house and a dog, so that we generally have something to ask, someone to point a finger at – “here is a person, what is he?”. The nature of this intuitive clarity is unclear, but it is possible that this is some kind of innate ontology, an understanding of how to break up the world around us into objects, according to what principles to do this.

    We understand that both the little Chihuahua and the great Dane are dogs, and we do not understand it at all because we have a well-defined dictionary definition of the concept of “dog”in our head. However, many of us may also think about a hyena that it is a dog, and this is a cat-like creature, all of a sudden.

    This is a separate, interesting topic – how this is possible, how it happens, how individual objects and the universals that connect them relate – from attempts to understand this, one of the oldest philosophical disputes, the problem of universals, grows.

    So, a man. It is impossible to give a definition of a person that is universally applicable, complete, consistent and does not reduce to “a person is, ahem, a person“. Or you can, but such a definition will be completely useless-well, that's the truth, why do we need such a definition that would not allow us to confuse people and pillars, do you really need such a definition, and without it you can't do anything, you constantly get into a mess?

    The definition, in theory, should indicate such an essential characteristic of the defined that without having it, we cannot classify something as defined. And what kind of characteristic can a person have? Mind, from the obvious? And what is the mind? Something that only a person has? It looks like we don't know what it is. Do monkeys have it? And the children? And the mad ones? Can you call a racist reasonable? I wouldn't name it, but no one asks me. The” mind ” also has a big problem with intuitive clarity – there are far fewer cases when we can't understand whether a person is in front of us or not, than there are cases when we can't tell whether we are dealing with the mind.

    But maybe it will be possible to sketch something for a specific task? What tasks do we have for such a definition? Offhand – philosophical, legal and biological.

    With biology, everything is simple (for us, ordinary people, and in general it is not at all simple, and many tooth-crushing philosophical works have been written about taxonomy in biology) – there are enough characteristic features that would allow us to distinguish the species homo sapiens sapiens from the total mass of living beings.

    With philosophy, everything is complicated. Everyone has heard about a two-legged animal without feathers – this is just an attempt to create a definition from the minimum necessary words. And everyone knows that the end of the matter was that this definition fell like chickens in the pluck. And no one has yet thought to take a man with his nails pulled out, so that they can attack him from the other side-so we have pulled out our nails and what now, we are not facing a man? And it seems to me that this will be the fate of any essentialist (that is, through the essence) definition of man. I could even say that a person is something that can evade definition. By the way, from here we can get to the question of free will – perhaps a person can be free precisely because he is able to escape. This includes escaping determinism, acting contrary to any prediction precisely because it was predicted so.

    There is another approach-to define a person as the ideal of a person. It is, however, forced to be formulated as ” a person is a person who…”, that is, through recursion, but it is still better. And most importantly-it is clear why. Because a person without an ideal is not a person.

    The existential approach to defining a person is interesting – not through the essence and not through the ideal, but through existence. A person is something that exists, being aware of its existence. It'll do, as long as we don't encounter other civilizations, and then we'll take a look. Or will breakthroughs in biology, philosophy of mind, and neurophysiology allow us to better understand how animals and humans think, and what if chimpanzees are also aware of their existence? And for many people, on the contrary, I would not guarantee that they are aware, so do not deprive them of the title “person”on this basis? Although it stops sounding proud in this situation.

    With law, everything seems complicated for us, but in general it is simple. Jurisprudence solves a simple problem-to draw a boundary between those to whom jurisprudence is applied, the subjects of legal relations and those to whom it is not applied, the objects of legal relations. Well, this border, in fact, is quite conditional. No one is trying to calculate the exact day when the embryo becomes a human, and no one is trying to justify this day either, we just postulated it conventionally. And the age of majority – why does a person become an adult at 18? Because we told him so. And the age of sexual consent. And the moment when we stop considering a person legally alive. And the moment when we deprive him of the right to manage his life, delegating it to other people. It is good when such things do not need a strict justification, because if we suddenly want to demand it , then our entire legal system will fall apart, and why do we need it?

  2. Ancient thinkers and philosophers began to search for the answer to this question. They noted (for themselves) that man is an unusual being by nature. From which there were many difficulties, difficulties, as for how to approach the study of it.

    Of course, the most reliable way to do this is by empirical means (through observations). They examined the person and drew conclusions accordingly. He (after all) is, “a living being is something sensually perceived” (Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher). It consists of a head, torso, etc. And then they would see a physical being, a natural being, that is, a physical being. But does all this (completely) define a person? Yes, of course, this does not affect everything about a person.

    After all, there is also something important (and essential) in it, without which a person is not a person. And of course this (missing) was the soul essence. They found it. And then they concluded: man is a necessary union of soul and body, “a man or a living being is a union of both as common” (Aristotle).

    For all that, they (still) saw that the soul is not similar to the corporeal in its mode of existence, but has a different, and, consequently, a different nature — the nature of the non-corporeal.

    Consequently, they came to the conclusion that a person (as a living being) consists of two entities-the soul and the body. And then they began to understand (for themselves) how they exist and relate (to each other). And there must be something important about that (of them) or more important in relation to the other, and noted that the main thing (in this connection) is the soul, “the soul is the first essence” (Aristotle). It is therefore the beginning of human existence, for again it shows itself with all its being as the same ” first essence.” They weren't wrong about that.

    In addition, through her entire existence, she showed that she possessed, so to speak, special perfections. And, they began to wonder-where did they come from, and this other (non-corporeal) nature? Near the body or among the body is not similar to find. Apparently (they thought), it is from another realm — of being) – heavenly, supersensible, divine (as in Fichte: “What is called heaven … is already here, around us, and its light burns in every pure heart”, and-in the soul.). And in accordance with the concepts of their time and expressed in accordance with all that. In the words of the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon: god, in creating this world, and therefore man (s), ” found it insufficient to take care only of the body, but, most importantly, he planted in man the most perfect soul.” So they found an explanation for the soul's appearance and its perfection.

    But the perfection of the soul is explained (also) by the fact that it has a mind (which the ancient Greek philosopher Plato considers important to draw our attention to, thus [that]” out of all that exists, it is only the soul that should acquire a mind”) and is arranged according to this principle (reason). And reason is the principle according to which the whole world is arranged. And it turns out that the soul, so to speak, “flesh of the flesh” comes from the very < that> world original that is the universal (universal) Mind, and even Higher — from the divine, from the One, the First… And because of all this, man is “defined as a rational living being” (Plotinus, the ancient philosopher).

    Therefore, having a perfect soul and a person acquires the status of the most perfect being on Earth. And that's certainly not all.

    Man, through his soul, is in deep unity with the world. And in this combination, as philosophers believe, the nature of the being of the world plane is manifested in it. After all, where does the German philosopher (Fichte)have such a spiritual attitude and ambition?: “We have measured the human spirit to the end…”, and [Only] “the rule of rules around him extends through man”, and how far he will advance (into the world), and “order and harmony will spread out from him to infinity… with the advancing culture of man, the culture of the universe will also move”. Yes, of course it is said boldly and powerfully… but these are the words of a philosopher-and what a philosopher !

  3. This is someone who is able to suffer from not knowing the answer to the question ” What am I?” Does not suffer – not a person. There is an option: I used to suffer, but then I stopped… And no need for any encyclopedias!

  4. The most successful, dangerous for all living things intelligent on our planet – today. Individually reasonable – is not, reasonable-cultures/subcultures.

  5. There are two points of view: biology and philosophy.
    From the point of view of biology, a human is a social animal (or creature, if you prefer), a mammal with a very developed brain and complex behavior, capable of self-awareness. Man is the result of a huge evolutionary path, he is extremely complex and interesting, and we (people) still do not fully understand how our body works, although we already know a lot.
    From the point of view of philosophy, a person can be either a primitive biological machine, or a being that creates and transforms the world and society around him. Each person is unique, and it depends only on you who you will become, what will be the meaning of your life and how you will affect the lives of people around you.

    Many other interesting explanations and lessons can be found on my website chevostik.ru!

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6 Answers

  1. Hello there! Not every person by birthright has already become a person. If we roughly designate these philosophical categories, then we can divide a person into two components – animal (instincts) and divine (reason, mind).

    And who commands whom? You may not have noticed that this conflict in every person has been going on for centuries, if not millennia.

    So, if the divine part subordinates the animal part of a person, then this is already a person. If the opposite is true, then this is a menagerie that lives according to the dogma “who is stronger is right”.

    I can recommend the treatise “The Philosophy of Weapons” on this topic , in the 4th part these issues are raised and considered from different angles. https://yadi.sk/i/NusmRrVBbXis2g I think for general development, and for a more comprehensive approach to the issue, this view will be useful.

  2. Personality is a set of programs and settings in the mind through which it is easy to control a person.

    Look at children, when they see an inharmonious manifestation in relation to themselves, they do not yet know the attitudes that will later be inserted into them (this is not allowed, it is impolite), they immediately say: I will not play with them, make friends (interact), that is, they FEEL inharmonious energies for themselves and refuse to accept them.

  3. Personality is a set of images and representations of oneself, based on the feeling of an individual doer and an autonomous being. This can be expressed as follows:”I am an independent, separate human being from everything else.”

  4. yes. I know the answer to this question. it reads as follows:

    A person is a BEING with intelligence, feelings, and will.

    Point. It follows that this is not a concept and not only a person.

    All previous answers are INCORRECT.

  5. I think that a person is a reasonable person who has his own point of view, who is responsible for his deeds and actions. There are strong personalities, there are weak, insecure ones, and this is bad, although it is not reliable.

  6. Personality is primarily a concept that was developed in order to reflect a person as a subject of socio-cultural life. Personality defines everyone as a carrier of the individual principle, which is revealed in social relations, communication and subject activity.

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