How Many Kinds of Persons Are There? This course, convened via seminar and intended for students who have had at least one previous course in anthropology, the history of medicine, or the philosophy of mind, introduces a theme foundational to all three: personhood. As it turns out, the answer to the question, How many kinds of persons are there? varies depending on whom you ask, when, and in what context. In some times and places it has been unremarkable to treat animals—or certain animals—as beings possessed of an interiority not unlike our own. In our own day, we have come to see it as unremarkable to ascribe personhood to corporations—in the United States, corporations have a legally sanctioned right of free speech. Should we treat automata that lack interiority—a something-it-is-like-ness—but exhibit qualities of speech similar to our own (e.g., large language models) as persons? What about biological chimerae? Should we ascribe personhood to rivers, as courts in Aotearoa New Zealand, in acknowledgment of Māori legal tradition, have done? To mountains? We’ll devote special attention to the challenge of bridging the hermeneutic gap between our own theories of personhood and those of some of the communities we’ll be discussing. Does it make it less difficult to imagine that Thunder, say, could be a person when we think about how we (some of us, anyway) talk to our favorite shirts? How should we interpret grammatical evidence that our working theory of personhood is not as tidy as we sometimes imagine—e.g., in 「車がいる。」, does the use of the animate verb show that we’re treating the (moving) car as a metonym for its driver? Or are we ascribing animacy to the car itself?
「車がいる。」kuruma ga iru, ‘There’s a car [moving].’
Again, it all sounds so easy.
Thank you all for your withship as readers the past four months. 🙇 STUFF will take a brief hiatus and return, with luck, in a new format early in the new year.
jb