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Beginning in the 2010s, rivers have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike, as part of a rapidly growing phenomenon described by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd as 'a legal revolution that could save the world'. Investigating river cases in jurisdictions as diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia, and following Nicole Graham's suggestion that the non‐human world is constantly reconstituted within an all‐encompassing legal cosmology for which any observable 'thing', any 'object', any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a 'lawscape', this paper explores the legal and the ontological nature of 'the river'. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of Nature judgments, the paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non‐human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near‐neglect, to a rights‐based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re‐conceptualisation. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of nature judgments, this paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non‐human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near‐neglect, to a rights‐based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re‐conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African understandings of personhood are complex, with different accounts emphasizing distinct aspects of what it means to be a person. Some accounts stress excellence of character and performing well in social roles and relationships, while others focus on innate moral qualities of individuals independent of their conduct and character. This paper sheds new light on these twin aspects of personhood. It proposes a way to navigate these dual features by bringing African and Western personhood into conversation, building on the strengths of each approach, and developing a new view of personhood that we call, Emergent Personhood. Section 1 introduces diverse approaches to personhood within African thought. Section 2 compares African and Western approaches. Section 3 evaluates advantages and disadvantages of each and identifies conditions that any account of personhood must meet to leverage the advantages and avoid the disadvantages identified. Section 4 introduces Emergent Personhood, which meets these conditions. Section 5 concludes that expanding the conversation about personhood across cultures enriches an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on 'Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea' reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction contextualises the nine papers that make up the special issue G ender and P erson in O ceania. Gender and personhood represent core orienting concepts within Pacific anthropology, from the pioneering work of Marilyn Strathern's G ender of the G ift to more recent scholarly attention to the impact of Christianity and modernity. The papers in this volume offer a comparative and critical perspective on long-standing ideas of 'relational' and 'individual' personhood across multiple sites in Oceania, highlighting several key insights, including the importance of situated and relational understandings of agency and the centrality of those 'things' typically seen as non-agentive to the formation of personhood. Most importantly, while re-establishing the inseparable articulation of personhood with gendered dynamics, the contributors to this volume also highlight the differential, transforming, and shifting nature of engendered personhood, revealed through close attention to local knowledge, conditions, and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) funding rules determine who can access which supports. However, what is less frequently acknowledged, is that those rules produce an assumed model of personhood. Arguably, this becomes most evident when a case for funding reaches the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, where disputes are resolved between the administrators of the scheme (NDIA) and NDIS participants. In 2019, one such significant and controversial case asserted that 'WRMF', a woman living with multiple sclerosis, could use her NDIS funding to pay for the services of a sexual therapist. The basis for this ruling involved complex debates about citizenship and rights, which were embedded in contested notions of the person. In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to examine these competing claims and the individualised framework in which WRMF's case was debated. The analysis reveals two key social justice issues: first, that there are limits to the citizenship available for people living with a disability (which assumes compulsory able‐bodiedness); second, that broader concepts of the person require explicit attention from the NDIS to embrace more expansive notions of citizenship for people living with a disability, including acknowledgement of sexual identities and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to bring to light the distinctive features of Fichte's construal of cosmopolitan right in the Foundations of Natural Right—in comparison to Kant's—in the light of the current philosophical debate on migration and global justice. The paper is articulated in three steps. First, it analyzes the addressees and content of Fichte's cosmopolitan right by emphasizing its limited scope: by focusing on those individuals who do not come "from any state," Fichte's discussion of cosmopolitan right foreruns Arendt's philosophical theorization of statelessness and the "right to have rights." Second, it considers Fichte's justification of cosmopolitan right—and its compatibility with his justification of private property rights—by stressing its ontological anchoring in the notions of "absolute will," "personhood," and "original right." Finally, the essay considers the systematic position of cosmopolitan right with regard to the "right of nations" and the "right of a state" in Fichte's doctrine of right by giving special attention to the range of reasons that, according to Fichte, can legitimate the rejection of a stranger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the case of an Aboriginal woman from Central Australia who has in recent years experienced a radical shift in her life circumstances. It pursues a writerly approach that makes the variety of forces and relationships legible that she now navigates, including that of the anthropologist‐friend. 'Journeying with' is proposed as an ethnographic method as well as an ethical stance well attuned to the turbulent circumstances of the present—in the Warlpiri life sketched here, and globally. Destabilization and displacement are increasingly common features of contemporary experience, and this paper proposes that ethnography anchored at the level of the individual person is well placed to engage unsettling transformations in the world at large, in social relationships, and modes of personhood, as well as in anthropological production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores philosophy in its relation to other disciplines and practices that also seek to understand the distinctive nature of human persons. It begins with a consideration of the nature of philosophy, arguing for a pluralistic conception reflecting different ends, and relating these to art, politics, religion, and science. It illustrates this via connections between the thought and work of Andy Warhol and Arthur Danto, Wagner and Nietzsche, and Roger Scruton and James MacMillan. It then shifts to a fifth methodological conception of philosophy as the discipline of disciplines, specifically in clarifying concepts and presuppositions, and relates this to marking the boundaries of personhood. Finally, it explores a particular example of philosophy in relation to another practice, art, this time giving priority to art itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absorbing insights from secular discourses on personhood, theology can provide added perspectives on human identity. (1) An attributive view of personal dignity based on divine and social recognition encompasses both capacity‐oriented and relation‐centred views of personhood. (2) Gregory of Nyssa shows Patristic resources for multifaceted ecological self in some contrast to the inner‐Trinitarian idea of ecclesial persons in John D. Zizioulas. (3) An economic Trinitarian model of personhood is proposed, in which the indwelling of Christ is balanced by a pneumatological anthropology. (4) Entering contemporary discussions, the paper proposes a "sonar" or "re‐sonant" understanding of the human per‐sona, hereby accommodating and responding to particularistic challenges to the idea of a shared human personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of authenticity plays an important role in how people reason about objects, other people, and themselves. However, despite a great deal of academic interest in this concept, to date, the precise meaning of the term, authenticity, has remained somewhat elusive. This paper reviews the various definitions of authenticity that have been proposed in the literature and identifies areas of convergence. We then outline a novel framework that organizes the existing definitions of authenticity along two key dimensions: (i) describing the type of entity that is evaluated and (ii) describing the source of information that is consulted. We argue that this convergence across a number of papers, and more importantly, across a number of domains, reflects significant progress in articulating the meaning(s) of authenticity. We conclude by suggesting new avenues for research in this area, with particular attention toward psychological process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of the relations between emotions and personhood, with a view to advancing a critical realist account of the role of emotions in social life. It is argued that the constitution of persons has to be approached from an ontological perspective, and that this raises questions about how sociology has addressed the meaning and role of emotions. Margaret Archer's critical realist perspective on them as commentaries on human concerns is broadly endorsed, but some significant correctives are proposed, especially with respect to the important distinction between primary and secondary emotions. To this end, it is argued that the affect spectrum theory advanced by Warren TenHouten can be fruitfully appended to a critical realist theory of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecological and societal problems caused by product obsolescence and consumerism in modern economies constitute a "wicked human‐made problem" of significant magnitude. Current (old) ways of thinking cannot address these problems. Accordingly, in this paper, we critically explore the novel idea of integrated personhood and worldviews to theorize research on self‐repairers and their repair behaviours to extend product lifetimes. We conducted a structured and systematic review of published work (n = 183) to identify the conceptual content of the field to inform our theorization. Our findings highlight three key issues. First, constricted theorization undermines understanding of self‐repairers and their product lifetime extension (and spillover) behaviours. Second, the underlying conceptual complexity is typically underestimated. Third, the dominance of voluntarist and deterministic studies impedes new directions in research. From our review, an integrated worldview–personhood framework emerges that can deepen understanding of avant‐garde self‐repairers' engagement with product lifetimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person-centred care is often cited as an aim of gerontological nursing and promotion of personhood is said to be the basis for person-centred care. As such, it forms a cornerstone value for many gerontological nurses, particularly those working in dementia care. Tom Kitwood’s ideas and definition of personhood are widely referred to in the literature and used in the dementia care field. More recently, there is a move to critique and partially reject Kitwood’s ideas on personhood. This paper has three aims: (i) to explore some central ideas around key theories of personhood (ii) to critique Kitwood’s work on personhood. (iii) To summarize current critiques of Kitwood’s ideas and provide a response that outlines why Kitwoods’ ideas are still relevant. It is suggested many critiques ignore Kitwoods’ ultimate purpose; that of moral concern for ‘others’. However, the main criticism put forward in this paper is that, rather than completely rejecting personhood theories, Kitwood locates his work on what it means to be a person within a traditional Cartesian personhood framework, albeit from a revised or pragmatic viewpoint. Finally, it is suggested that definitions of persons and personhood need to take account of the body and time (corporeality and temporality) and gerontological nursing may want to reassess how much allegiance is given to basing nursing frameworks on the concept of personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We applaud Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori's goal to clarify the self-regulation literature and to show how intra-individual personality studies might help do this. Unfortunately, we do not believe the paper achieves its goal. Rather it only confuses matters further. This is due to the lack of clear definitions or explanation of key concepts and theories, false claims about certain personality measures and other issues, confusions about the relation between process and content, the offering as new insights ideas which are, in fact, not new, and the failure to make clear how intra-individual studies would actually be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores diaspora spatialities infrequently evoked within postcolonial geography: those of early twentieth-century South Asian migrants to Britain who occupied privileged positions of class and status in their countries of origin. Specifically, I explore the collective practices of members of a London-based, upper middle-class/elite Sri Lankan women's association, formed in 1949. By closely exploring the group's historically contingent social practices, the paper evokes a problematic set of postcolonial geographies. Members’ performative expression of feminized and respectable modes of Sri Lankan-ness, underpinned by the ‘trusteeship’ that characterized Ceylon's late colonial relationship with Britain and familiar to them from their privileged backgrounds, have cultivated spatialities that remain imbued with colonial ideology. In this diaspora space, dimensions of late colonial modernity continue to problematically shape members’ subjectivities and social relations amidst an expanding Sri Lankan community in London. This paper shows how the Association's ongoing performance of late colonial, privileged and elite modes of Sri Lankan-ness has (re)produced space for the possibility of the negotiation of a politics of personhood for women whose bodies were racially and sexually marked as outside in post-imperial London. The paper contributes a better understanding of the wide range of postcolonial formations that occur in variable ways and distinct settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J. M. Bernstein argues that to capture the depths of the harm of torture, we need to do away with the idea that we possess intrinsic and inviolable worth. If personhood is inviolable, then torture can inflict only apparent harm on our standing as persons. Bernstein claims that torture is a paradigm of moral injury because it causes what he calls "devastation": The victim experiences an actual degradation of his or her personhood. Bernstein argues that our value is given to us through mutual recognition and hence can be lost. In this paper, I argue that if our human value can be lost, then it first must be built up. If it must be built up, then the question of our status before the building begins must be answered. Bernstein faces a problem of human beings who fall outside relations of mutual recognition and hence are valueless. His best option for answering this problem is to point to the centrality of the body in his account of recognition, but doing so reveals a notion of intrinsic worth implicit in his account. I call for a revision of Bernstein's account that can hold on to devastation without eschewing intrinsic worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we detail our praxis of decoloniality in the context of a community‐based study that employs a quantitative experimental methodology to evaluate an intervention for girls involved in the juvenile legal system. We resist the essentializing of methodology that positions quantitative paradigms as impermeable to reflexivity and decoloniality, and describe a model for training and supervising researchers engaged in an experimental randomized controlled trial of an advocacy program for girls, most of whom are girls of color and about half of whom identify as LGBT. In this way, we consider researcher training as a critical teaching context and describe the ways in which our training, community‐based data collection, and supervision structure are anchored in de/anti/post colonial and indigenous scholarships. Specifically, our praxis is centered on conducting research as a site of resistance to hegemony, and practicing a critical compassion rooted in remembering complex personhoods. We further discuss the boundaries and limitations of our own epistemic power in relation to two central questions: how can researchers influence how knowledge is produced? How can researchers influence how knowledge producers are themselves produced? Highlights: We present a model of researcher training focused on decolonial praxis.Researchers are trained to implement a randomized controlled trial for legal system‐involved girls.Researcher training focuses on conducting research as a site of resistance to hegemony.Researcher training focuses on practicing critical compassion to and remembering complex personhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between finiteness and clause size, taking Romance varieties with an irrealis subordinator as a case study: che/chi in upper southern Italian dialects (USIDs), cu in Salentino, mi/mu/ma in southern Calabrian, and să in Romanian. The last three of these, but not the first, also replace many uses of the infinitive. On a view of finiteness as the result of anchoring of Tense and Person (Groothuis 2020), these irrealis clauses constitute a different degree of finiteness when selected by a functional verb than when selected by a lexical verb. The question thus arises of whether a reduction in finiteness corresponds to a reduction in clause structure. Tests show that these irrealis subordinators form a non‐homogeneous category. Only USID che/chi and Romanian să can be analysed as regular complementisers. Salentino cu and southern Calabrian mu, in contrast, occupy a v‐related position when selected by aspectuals, a T‐related position when selected by modals, and FinP when selected by lexical verbs. The reduced degree of finiteness thus does not correspond to a reduced clause in all varieties. The conclusion is therefore that the same level of finiteness does not necessarily translate into the same amount of functional structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The High Court of Delhi recently declared that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial anti-sodomy law that effectively criminalised homosexuality, violates rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India. This has been the first juridical recognition of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender folk as citizens and also the first time that the juridical subject has been ascribed a 'sexuality'. 'Sexuality', in other words, has been identified as an aspect of personhood, the 'self' that the subject refers to. And yet, same-sex desire in India is not contained within discrete bodies, much less so within bodies presumed in bio-medical or juridical discourses as 'sexuality types'. This recognition lies at the centre of the Queer movement which made the ascription of sexuality to the juridical subject in the first place. Based on ethnographic fieldwork related to the litigation, this paper argues that the juridical register requires demands for rights to articulate in terms of subjectivity and personhood, and examines the ways in which this disjuncture came to be managed by the movement. The paper examines theoretical approaches to subjectivity and argues for a conceptual distinction between the idea of the 'subject' and the 'self'. Subjectivity, it is argued, is better understood in terms of forms of (legal) legibility, bringing our focus onto the political-economic, historical and cultural conditions under which these forms come to be performed as embodiments-in-the-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a paper published in Bioethics, Jason Eberl has argued that early embryos are not persons and should not be granted the status possessed by them. 1 Eberl bases this position upon the following claims: (1) The early embryo has a passive potentiality for development into a person. (2) The early embryo has not established both ‘unique genetic identity’ and ‘ongoing ontological identity’, which are necessary conditions for ensoulment. (3) The early embryo has a low probability of developing into a more developed embryo. This paper examines these claims. I argue against (1) that a plausible view is that the early embryo has an active potentiality to grow into a more developed embryo. Against (2), I argue that neither ‘unique genetic identity’ nor ‘ongoing ontological identity’ are necessary conditions for ensoulment, and that ‘ongoing ontological identity’ is established between early embryos and more developed embryos. Against (3), I argue that the fact that the early embryo has a low probability of developing into a more developed embryo, if true, does not warrant the conclusion that the early embryo is not a person. If Eberl is right that the human soul is that which organises the activities of a human being and that ensouled humans are persons, embryos are persons from conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their paper, Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori (2006 ) present a thorough analysis of self-regulatory behavior, understood as the most genuine expression of the agentic and purposive nature of human beings. Therefore, we can expect that research on personality could shed light on our understanding of self-regulatory processes and behavioral expressions. With this aim, Cervone et al. have carried out an updated analysis of personality psychology theory and research, resuming the debate between variable and person-centered approaches, and commenting on the contributions the Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA) can make to the design of idiosyncratic tools and strategies for personality assessment and to the understanding of the role of the personality system in different contexts of applied psychology, such as health, clinical and industrial/organisational psychology. Here, I would like to examine two topics, to which Cervone et al. pay substantial attention in their paper: self-regulation and personality dynamics, and the role of personality science in addressing central questions in health psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Zamucoan system of Person markers: personal pronouns, verbal and possessive inflection. Comparing the three documented languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco, currently spoken, and extinct Old Zamuco), one can reconstruct for a very ancient stage of this language family an agglutinating structure for both personal pronouns and verbal inflection, with Person and Number dealt with by, respectively, prefixes and suffixes. However, possessive inflection could not be accommodated within this system, since the noun suffix can only express possessum Number, while possessor Number has to be expressed by a dedicated prefix. This structural conflict forced the Zamucoan languages to attempt various solutions, departing from the original agglutinating logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In evaluating the contributions to this issue, this chapter questions the predictable co‐occurrence of cities with markets and states, a long‐held position in western social theory. However, an extreme relativism is also flawed, and the projection of anti‐capitalist fantasies on past, other peoples have equally distorted interpretations of the archaeological record and blinded researchers to the reality of market economies in societies including the Maya. Ultimately, the power of the comparative method entails more than the identification of commonalities between different market traditions. It can also serve to illuminate how market economics were embedded in distinct cultural, ideological, and material worlds. Calculating self‐interest, supply‐and‐demand, and impersonal exchange do not operate according to a single behavioral logic but are shaped by ideologies of identity and desire specific to distinct regimes of value. Therefore, attention to the cultural and spatial context of economic transactions—in the original spirit of Polanyi—remains indispensable to interpreting how markets may have shaped historically particular constructions of personhood, community, inequality, place, and the ontological status of commodities. In the end, I argue that archaeologists also need to investigate the political affordances of markets as specific urban places and not simply as epiphenomena to a priori political or economic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnographic account of sorcery accusation, violence, and subsequent community discussion provides a basis to explore the 'moral economy of agency' that shapes expressions and interpretations of personhood in Vanuatu. Mediated historically by transforming social, political, and economic circumstances, agency is demonstrated to be patterned according to culturally specific ontological and moral schemes. Key local categories of embodied personhood - including man ples (man place), man wan (man one), and jelus (jealousy) - are examined to elucidate two relationally entwined analytic categories, referred to as 'distributive' and 'possessive' agency. Such categories, it is argued, fundamentally shape expressions and interpretations of moral being and doing, including by providing a basis for identifying morally abject expressions of personhood. Taking seriously the important role of spiritual agency within such moral economies, this paper provides new ethnographically grounded insights into the ways in which communities and individuals negotiate moral being within transforming contexts of economic and sacred power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, sexuality is valued as a positive expression of relational personhood, registering the efficacy of consensual and pleasurable practice in producing and maintaining social relations. The power of sexuality to demonstrate individual and collective capacity and potential holds particular salience for unmarried young people. This paper draws on my ethnographic research on culture and HIV in the Trobriands to address perduring questions about the locus of individual autonomy in Melanesian sociality, where relational personhood shapes identity and modes of exchange in the moral economy. I focus on the gendered agency of youth sexuality, including the use of kwaiwaga, or love magic, in exercising and controlling desire. The narrative identities of two young women provide the lens through which questions of agency are explored, revealing how the autonomous mind, nanola, is central to understanding the embodiment of social relations, how the power of love magic transfers agency from one individual to another, and how individual assertions and acts are ultimately expressions of situated relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a response to the position paper "Pathways Forward for Indigenous Language Reclamation: Engaging Indigenous Epistemology and Learning by Observing and Pitching in to Family and Community Endeavors," by Henne–Ochoa et al., which appears within the issue. It discusses the revival of the minority language the Yucatec Maya language, including in regard to linguistic identity, indigeneity and personhood. An overview second language acquisition of Yucatec Maya is provided.

We are living in a time when it is frequently assumed that the logic of capital has subsumed every single aspect of our lives, intervening in the organization of our intimate relations as well as the control of our time, including investments in the future (e.g. via debt). The theories that document the incursion of this logic (often through the terms of neoliberalism and/or governmentality) assume that this logic is internalized, works and organizes everything including our subjectivity. These theories performatively reproduce the very conditions they describe, shrinking the domain of values and making it subject to capital's logic. All values are reduced to value. Yet values and value are always dialogic, dependent and co-constituting. In this paper I chart the history by which value eclipses values and how this shrinks our sociological imagination. By outlining the historical processes that institutionalized different organizations of the population through political economy and the social contract, producing ideas of proper personhood premised on propriety, I detail how forms of raced, gendered and classed personhood was formed. The gaps between the proper and improper generate significant contradictions that offer both opportunities to and limits on capitals' lines of flight. It is the lacks, the residues, and the excess that cannot be captured by capital's mechanisms of valuation that will be explored in order to think beyond the logic of capital and show how values will always haunt value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to be mistaken about the content of our first-order intentional states. For proponents of the rational agency model of self-knowledge, such failures might seem very difficult to explain. On this model, the authority of self-knowledge is not based on inference from evidence, but rather originates in our capacity, as rational agents, to shape our beliefs and other intentional states. To believe that one believes that p, on this view, constitutes one's belief that p and so self-knowledge involves a constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs. If this is true, it is hard to see how those second-order beliefs could ever be false. I develop two counter-examples which show that despite the constitutive relation between first- and second-order beliefs in standard cases of self-knowledge, it is possible to be mistaken, and even self-deceived, about the content of one's own beliefs. These counter-examples do not show that the rational agency model is mistaken-rather, they show that the possibility of estrangement from one's own mental life means that, even within the rational agency model, it is possible to have false second-order beliefs about the content of one's first-order beliefs. The authority of self-knowledge does not entail that to believe that one believes that p suffices to make it the case that one believes that p. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that under certain prevalent interpretations of the nature and aims of cognitive science, theories of cognition generate a forced choice between a conception of cognition which depends on the possibility of a private language, and a conception of cognition which depends on mereological confusions. We argue, further, that this should not pose a fundamental problem for cognitive scientists since a plausible interpretation of the nature and aims of cognitive science is available that does not generate this forced choice. The crucial difference between these interpretations is that on the one hand the aim of theories of cognition is to tell us what thinking (etc.) is, and on the other it is to tell us what is causally necessary if an intelligent creature is to be able to think. Our argument draws heavily on a Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy in which no philosophical theory can explain what thinking, perceiving, remembering, etc. are, either. The positive, strictly therapeutic, purpose of a philosophy of cognitive science should be to show that, since the traditional problems which constitute the philosophy of mind are chimerical, there is nothing for philosophical theorizing in cognitive science to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many metaphysicians tell us that our world is one in which persisting objects are four-dimensionally extended in time, and persist by being partially present at each moment at which they exist. Many normative theorists tell us that at least some of our core normative practices are justified only if the relation that holds between a person at one time, and that person at another time, is the relation of strict identity. If these metaphysicians are right about the nature of our world, and these normative theorists are right about what justifies our normative practices, then we should be error theorists about the justification of at least some of our core normative practices and in turn, arguably we should eliminate those practices for which justification is lacking. This paper offers a way of resolving the tension between these two views that does not lead into the grips of error theory. It is a way that is amenable to 'exceptionists' about persons: those who think there is something special about persons and the first-person perspective; that personhood cannot be explained naturalistically, and the first-person perspective is naturalistically irreducible. The conclusion is thus a conditional: given that one is an exceptionist, an attractive way to resolve this tension is to embrace the view that persons are sui generis ontological kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the themes and practices of Christian performance at the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warlungurru in 1988,1 six years after the Pintupi return to their homelands (see ; ; ) and the enthusiastic Christian revival-nightly Gospel singing, a ban on gambling-experienced in the first years of their return. My concern is with how a distinctively Lutheran focus in Pintupi Christianity (in opposition to competing Pentecostal orientations in Central Australia at that time) was grasped by some Pintupi as a structure organising relations between Indigenous people and others in the world, and how specialised knowledge constituted positions of prestige and authority. Thus, I explore certain convergences between prior Indigenous formulations of personhood and relatedness and the way in which Lutheran Christianity was articulated during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper teases out the interdiscursive relations between local and perduring signs of personhood and their recontextualization in situated talk. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence of the utility of incorporating ethnography, linguistic anthropological work on semiotics and work on face-to-face interaction. My empirical focus is on two consecutive men's meetings that occurred in an urban Indonesian milieu. In particular, I draw upon work on semiotic register formation and processes of social identification to flesh out how signs from different temporal-spatial scales figure in the social identification of a non-present neighbor as deviant and Chinese. By taking an interactional view I also attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship on such inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto primarily been historical in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier work I developed an argument favoring one view of persistence (viz., perdurance) over its rivals, based on considerations of the relativity of three-dimensional spatial shapes of physical objects in Minkowski spacetime. The argument has since come under criticism (in the works of Theodore Sider, Kristie Miller, Ian Gibson, Oliver Pooley, and Thomas Sattig). Two related topics, explanatory virtues and explanatory relevance, are central to these critical discussions. In this paper I deal with these topics directly and respond to my critics by offering a new perspective on the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the interconnections among discourse, personhood and the political economy of contemporary urban transformation. Drawing on interview and walking-tour data from three redeveloping neighborhoods in a mid-size city in the U.S. Southeast, I examine metasemiotic descriptions of the ‘engaged urban resident’ as a particular emblem of identity that is circulated in a social network of residents and community-redevelopment sponsors. Using a discourse-analytic approach, I discuss four different excerpts as recontextualizations of the emblem, moving from an institutional description that offers an abstract model of conduct for urban residents to deictically concrete and personalized testimonies of resident action. The analysis highlights how despite a common thematic focus on resident engagement, personal commentaries and stories of resident activism steer away from the institutional ideal of positive problem solving toward conflict and acts of removal. I identify links between circulated metasemiotic descriptions of the ‘engaged urban resident’ and market-led urban redevelopment and argue that individual reframings and enactments of the institutionally-mandated urban persona can foster socially exclusive and spatially-purified urban neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of the nature of personhood through the medium of the concept of piot in the Lihir islands, Papua New Guinea. Piot is an embodied experience in response to the movement of others in space. When people leave or arrive at a place and spend the night, others in the area feel unwell. Piot is thus one aspect of the relations between persons. I suggest that ideas of relational personhood are inadequate to fully comprehend piot, and, following LiPuma (1998) and Clay (1986) rather than Strathern (1988), argue that persons in Lihir are more than just relational beings who always act with others in mind. Piot is predicated on the dual themes of fixed sociality and mobility that are important in Lihir as elsewhere in Melanesia (cf Eves 1998; Patterson 2002). Through piot, persons comment on and sanction the movement of others, yet this mobility still occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'quality' ( suzhi) has become a ubiquitous part of Chinese popular discourses and the focus of Chinese educational campaigns. Amorphous, multivalent, and widely used, the term 'high quality' represents a kind of ideal personhood associated with urban modernity. Based on 32 months of participant observation conducted in schools and homes in a Chinese city between 1997 and 2006, this paper examines how and why urban Chinese only-children with various different strengths in morality, cosmopolitanism, and academic attainment chose, defended, and promoted definitions of quality that favored their own strengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One increasingly popular approach to personal identity is called ‘animalism.’ Unfortunately, it is unclear just what the doctrine says. In this paper, I criticise several different ways of stating animalism, and put forward one formulation that I find more promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori (2006 ) propose that theories of personality architecture may provide an integrative theoretical framework for self-regulation research. Building further on this argument, the present paper considers one comprehensive modern approach to personality architecture, personality systems interactions (PSI) theory. The authors provide a brief overview of PSI theory and discuss a simple, three-step “user's manual” that has guided applications of the theory to real-life behavior. Work on PSI theory highlights some of the integrative potential of personality science in the field of self-regulation. The authors conclude that theories of personality architecture may improve the quality and precision of the counselling, coaching, and training that psychologists in many diverse areas provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim. Drawing on research exploring nursing students’ experiences of working with older people, this paper aims to demonstrate how context and culture can impact on the realization of their ideals. Background. The principles underpinning individualized and person-centred approaches to care resonate with those focal to gerontologic nursing. Restrictive contexts of care and pervasive workplace cultures render nurses unable to deliver care in accord with these. Design and method. This interpretive study was informed by phenomenological–hermeneutic theory. A purposive sample ( n = 10) was recruited from a single educational institution. Data were generated in two phases using loosely structured interviews and supplementary activity. Themes explicating their experiences were identified via systematized detailed analysis and issues pertaining to nursing students’ orientation towards older people cut across these. Findings and discussion. Students perceived that older people were prone to depersonalization and marginalization, so sought to show respect by coming to know individuals, form human connections with them and personalize care accordingly. Giving respect, promoting personhood, asserting reciprocal identity and maintaining dignity were prominent features of this but were often frustrated by practices and cultures encountered in mainstream settings. Conclusions. Nursing students’ approaches to older people are contextual and reflect elements of person-centred ideology. Their attempts upholding their ideals are liable to be subverted by workplace norms. Preparatory education should address these, assist students to learn how to attend to personhood in restrictive environments and offer targeted placements in age-specific and non-acute services. Relevance to clinical practice. Demographic trends mean that working with older people has increased significance for nurses in most settings. Person-centredness is seen as beneficial for older people but contemporary service imperatives and enduring practices are inhibitory, preventing entrants to nursing from developing related skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not living up to one's ideal self has been shown to coincide with decreased self-esteem. In the present paper this notion is applied to the differentiation between people with independent versus interdependent self-construal. We suggest that the ideal self of independents differs in two respects from the one of interdependents: with respect to its contents (autonomous versus social self-knowledge) and with respect to the degree of context-dependency of the encoded knowledge (context-independent versus context-dependent self-knowledge). In three studies, via a priming we either manipulated contents or degree of context-dependency of what participants con side red themselves to actually be like. On both explicit and implicit measures, participants with independent construal indicated higher self-esteem after priming of autonomous and context-independent knowledge than after priming of social and context-dependent knowledge. The opposite pattern was observed in participants with interdependent construal. Results suggest that independent and interdependent construals mirror different ideals which are applied as a comparison standard when evaluating the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Lebron's prizewinning 2013 book, I The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time i ,[1] is a welcome and valuable contribution to that growing but still very small body of books dealing with race and justice from a mainstream analytic perspective, building on the pioneering work of Bernard Boxill and Howard McGary.[2] Other entries in this tradition would include, most recently, honorary philosopher Andrew Valls's I Rethinking Racial Justice i , my own I Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism i , Tommie Shelby's I Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform i , Elizabeth Anderson's I The Imperative of Integration i , and Kevin Graham's I Beyond Redistribution: White Supremacy and Racial Justice i .[3] Valorizing such work does not mean deprecating the Continental tradition. 77 Lebron ([10]), 40. 78 Lebron ([10]), 167, n. 1. 79 "Rawls ... properly identifies society as a scheme of ongoing cooperation": Lebron ([10]), 9. 80 "[H]is recent embrace of reparations is a puzzling solution to a problem that is not fundamentally rooted in problems of distribution"; "Mills's failure to look beyond reparations is puzzling ... [I]n Mills's move to argue for a material solution to racial [in]equality ... he has lost sight of what a transformative theory of racial justice would entail" (Lebron [10], 19, 40-41). Compare Lebron's supposedly radically different account: "The idea of social value is meant to denote the way narratives, power, and values coalesce around racial identity, thereby serving to justify blacks' lower normative standing - they are not accorded equal concern, respect, or civic consideration" ([10]), 44. 54 Lebron ([10]), 60. 55 Lebron ([10]), 53-54. 56 Lebron ([10]), chap. 3. 57 Lebron ([10]), 71. 58 Lebron ([10]), 95, 105. [Extracted from the article]

In examining affective motivations and meanings associated with kin‐based tattooing, this article proposes a practice of 's/kinship': the tangible inscription of relational personhood on the body. While research on the practice of Western tattooing has long been drawn into discourses of deviance and individual identity, little attention has been paid to the tattooing of social relations. Drawing on surveys and interview data, this article highlights the significance of kinship and other forms of relationality in tattooing, bringing attention to how these are manifested through the skin as expressions of social proximity, permanence, and porosity. In doing so an analytic approach to s/kinship is developed to foreground the practice of tattooing as an expression of relational personhood, one that highlights the permeability of personhood as a salient ontological feature in the social life of tattoos and the tattooed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines some problems in the current literature on Implicit Personality Theory (IPT) with specific reference to the controversial publications by Mirels (1976) and Jackson, Chan, and Stricker (1979). Their disputes address the question of whether individuals' estimates of trait co-occurrence accurately reflect actual (empirical) trait co-occurrence in personality ratings. The cogency of the disputes is undermined, however, by both studies' deficiences at the levels of theory, measurement, and statistical analysis. For instance, the indices used for representing estimated and empirical trait co-occurrence are neither adequately justified nor commensurate. For future personality attribution research, we discuss both the theoretical distinction between two (comparative and absolute) judgment formats frequently involved in data gathering and the empirical distinction between sophisticated and unsophisticated research strategies involved in data analysis. Finally, it was concluded that due to the residual effect of the empiricism of the 1950s and 1960s, and a lack of logical coherence between cognitive psychology, psychometric theories, and statistical data manipulations, IPT is still at an early stage of development. Future investigators should therefore develop a rigorous program with the sophistication of so- called “nomological operationalization” for a systematic investigation of IPT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Mirels (1976) demonstrated that derivations from Implicit Personality Theory were compromised by marked absolute discrepancies between subjects' estimates of the coendorsement of personality items and the empirical relations between the items. Arguments presented by Jackson, Chan, and Stricker (1979) in a recent critique of this demonstration were shown to be based on an arbitrary and severely restrictive view of implicit theory. Logical and empirical considerations were brought to bear in the present paper to indicate that (a) empirical conditional probabilities of test item coendorsement are an appropriate comparison standard for estimates of those probabilities, (b) large absolute discrepancies between estimated and empirical coendorsement must be regarded as seriously impugning the accuracy of IPT, and (c) exclusive reliance on the correlational correspondence between estimated and empirical coendorsement results in an overly sanguine view of the accuracy of IPT. Moreover, it was shown that subjects fail to discriminate between highly asymmetrical conditional probabilities, a finding directly at variance with the assertion that the presumably veridical postulates of implicit theory are inductively extracted from experience. Also discussed were the relation between IPT and everyday social judgments, and the influence of IPT on behavioral ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY: In this article, I discuss coastal and oceanic biocultural heritage and its relevance to a transformed perception of the ocean and coast in South Africa. An anthropology of biocultural heritage at the coast reveals the multidimensional nature of personhoods—specifically transspecies, trans‐material forms of personhood—and the rich dialogical engagement of "humans" with nature and marine species. Through sensory ethnography on coastal biocultural heritage in South Africa's Northern Cape, Western Cape, and Eastern Cape provinces, I challenge anthropocentric strategies for ocean management and assert the need to consider sensory/embodied relations with the sea and the sentience of other species in the marine space. By presenting on and discussing coastal biocultural heritage, I hope to advance discussions on identity in Africa as well as marine epistemologies for a rehumanized ocean management in South Africa and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a pro tanto moral reason to create a life merely because it would be good for the person living it? Proponents of the procreation asymmetry claim there is not. Defending this controversial no reason claim, some have suggested that it is well in line with other phenomena in the moral realm: there is no reason to give a promise merely because one would keep it, and there is no reason to procreate merely to increase the extent of justice in the world. Allegedly, some analogs extend so far as to support a unified theory of the no reason claim and the nonidentity thesis, that is, the view that of two persons leading lives of positive wellbeing, there is a reason to create the person with higher wellbeing. I dismantle the proposed analogs and show that they fail to meet various desiderata. Moreover, I refute Johann Frick's argument that the no reason claim follows from the assumption that reasons of beneficence are reasons to act for the sake of people. By criticizing attractive defenses for the no reason claim, I weaken its plausibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion that Christ is truly and fully human supports using Christology as a starting point to frame discussions surrounding humanity. This article focuses on the Christological distinction between personhood and nature that is made in the Chalcedonian Definition and argues that it could reframe current discussions in the science–theology discourse on humanity identity. As discussions of human identity often center around issues such as personhood, consciousness, and the soul, taking this Christological perspective into account means that scholars must consider whether scientific contributions are engaging with characteristics of human nature or personhood, and recognize the theological distinction. To address some of the troubling implications of this reframing, this article proposes a vision of humanity as natural energies expressing an unrepeatable personhood, based largely on the work of the Eastern Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras. This proposal takes traditional Christology seriously in its relevance to discussions on human identity, while possibly enabling even more productive engagement with scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opening chapter of Genesis makes a lofty claim about the human condition: that humans are created in the image of God. But why can humans image God? This article examines four different interpretations of humans as interpretive animals. Following Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein, I argue that humans are interpretive animals, and as such, are suitable creatures to bear God's image. Humans as interpretive animals function as the image of God, not because of divine fiat; instead, humans in their capacities are open to being the image. My argument is not that the image of God is identifiable as particular human features. Instead, it is the fact that humans have specific capacities that make them interpretive animals (e.g., radical openness, thrownness, malleability) and that these traits are constitutive for what it means to be human. Alongside Heidegger, I draw on the works of Charles Taylor, Claudia Welz, and Kathryn Tanner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]