Ifeanyi Menkiti’s “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought” is criticized from the standpoint that the author assumes a dichotomous framework taken over in his decision to articulate the African view of the person in the idiom of modern philosophy. Kwame Gyekye’s critique of Menkiti in “Person and Community in Akan Thought” is also scrutinized to see if it manages to break free from this framework. I conclude by calling for a departure from quasi-scientific approaches to human nature and experience (...) that attempt to apprehend culture from a position without culture. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, I have been asked many questions regarding the substance and methodology of my essay “Person and Community in African Thought”. I cannot in the space of these pages retrieve or reframe the content and implications of these several questions and it would be fool-hardy to attempt an answer to all of them here. But that is no reason not to try to say a few things, by way of additional commentary, on the occasion of this (...) retrospective on the essay. It would be helpful to proceed by concentrating on a few issues which have been of some concern, or interest, to readers over the years, adding a response, however brief, as I go along. Keywords: Community, Personhood, Descriptive Metaphysics Africa Philosophy Human Person. (shrink)

There has been a debate, popularized by Ifenyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye, regarding philosophical understandings of the human person in Africa. The debate revolves around the saying "So and so is not a person." Gyekye convincingly argues that the saying is a manner of speech, intended to be a moral evaluation of a person's actions. Menkiti, however, goes further and suggests that many of the African conceptions of a person are based on a dynamic understanding of the self. Similar findings (...) were made of Maasai concepts of personhood in the study done by Patrick Dikirr. The "potential self" is not given but is always being constructed by one's deeds and one's relations. While it is certainly a romanticization to imagine Africans as harmoniously communal in contrast to the "isolated individuals" who supposedly inhabit the West, nevertheless, for a Maasai one gains self-identity and status to a large extent through one's relations to other persons and to animals. However, the paper illustrates the many ways in which Maasais still emphasize individual achievement and thought, debunking notions of African "group-think" and conformity. The paper then draws on Axel Honneth's insights into "recognition" to note the extent to which Maasai recognition of each other prevents the community's capitulation to the value system of other ethnic groups in Kenya or Western influence. (shrink)

This essay provides an exposition and a plausible interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s conception of personhood vis-a-vis this community. I do this, partly, to rebut some specific criticisms by Kwame Gyekye and Bernard Matolino. They construe Menkiti’s account, primarily, as a metaphysical thesis about the community that provides the essential ontological basis for the nature of personhood. They argue that this view of communitarianism is radical or extreme because the community diminishes individuality and prioritizes community’s interests over individuals’ interests, freedom, and (...) rights. I argue that Gyekye’s and Matolino’s interpretations of Menkiti’s view are mistaken, and that Menkiti’s account of the connection between the community and personhood is a social-moral thesis. This thesis argues that the community provides the norms and material conditions for individuals to live a meaningful life and achieve personhood, and achieving personhood involves being integrated into, and contributing positively to the harmony of, the community. Keywords: Menkiti, Gyekye, Matolino, Personhood, Community, Moderate Communitarianism, Radical Communitarianism. (shrink)

The debate on the communitarian notion of personhood as initiated by Gyekye, in response to Menkiti, is both exhaustive and exhausted. Its exhaustiveness and exhaustion lies in the fact that, in all probability whatever can be said around it has been said, with truly nothing new likely ever being added. What is possibly left, is the potential for further additions to be more strident in their picking of sides or repeating that Gyekye and Menkiti are not sufficiently different or insisting (...) on the authenticity of either approach to African thought. What is needed is to transcend the constraints of this debate by opening up new vistas of interpreting communitarian thought in personhood. Whatever merit there is in showing whether radical or moderate communitarianism is real, or in showing which of these two is better than the other, this discussion can be furthered by looking at implications of communitarianism to other facets of philosophy. The most plausible avenue that could be implicated in communitarian considerations is the sphere of politics. Theorising about the communitarian notion of persons, I suggest, is partly to theorise about the political. If the commitments on which the doctrine of communitarianism is founded, are used to capture the sort of relations that exist between individuals, and between individuals and the community, then this relationship has an effect on how we conceive of the political theory we think appropriate. It is suggested here that contemplating on the communitarian polity will show the shortcomings of communitarianism as conceived by Gyekye and Menkiti. Keywords: Menkiti, Gyekye, Communitarianism, Limited Communitarianism, Personhood, Classical Communitarianism. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Menkiti’s normative personhood is exclusionary, and logically inadequate, especially regarding mentally disabled persons. My argument is that Menkiti’s account of personhood as a moral-political theory does not possess the resources to accommodate and account for mentally disabled persons because of its rigid process of transformation, which requires moral excellence. An inclusive moral theory, I argue, should be able to accommodate all members of the moral community irrespective of their ability, but rather, their (...) capacity for relationships. Tapping into the intellectual resources of conversational thinking, I propose another conception of personhood predicated on moral status as the basis for personhood. With this method, I query the inclusiveness of Menkiti’s conception and demonstrate that a relational alternative option that bases moral status on the human capacity for relationships might be more inclusive. Here, personhood is anchored on the capacity for relationships, not the ability to exude moral excellence. I then contend that this moral status conception of personhood possesses the needed resources to account for all because it is inclusive and egalitarian, riding on the crest of Ezumezu logic, which is also both egalitarian and inclusive. (shrink)

This book examines issues relating to Menkiti’s “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” which articulates an African notion of personhood. Contributors not only show that personhood is normative but also explore the implications this notion of personhood and citizenship holds for the nation-state in Africa.

In Menkiti’s Moral Man, Oritsegbubemi Oyowe aims to provide a sympathetic interpretation of the works of Ifeanyi Menkiti as they address personhood, community, and other facets of morality. In my contribution I maintain that, while Oyowe’s Menkiti is more plausible than the way Menkiti has often been read, there are still respects in which the account of personhood advanced invites criticism. One criticism is that it is implausible to think that personhood is constituted by others recognizing one as a person. (...) Instead, insofar as community constitutes one’s personhood, it is insofar as one lived up to norms of interpersonal morality. A second criticism is that there are intuitively some dimensions of personhood that are not constituted by the community or other-regard at all. In particular, I argue that there are moral duties to oneself that exist and that are not well captured by any sensible understanding of the view that community alone constitutes personhood, such that part of what it is to be a full person is to treat oneself in certain ways. In sum, personhood, while admittedly social, is not as social as Oyowe’s Menkiti believes. (shrink)

This essay provides an exposition and a plausible interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s conception of personhood vis-a-vis this community. I do this, partly, to rebut some specific criticisms by Kwame Gyekye and Bernard Matolino. They construe Menkiti’s account, primarily, as a metaphysical thesis about the community that provides the essential ontological basis for the nature of personhood. They argue that this view of communitarianism is radical or extreme because the community diminishes individuality and prioritizes community’s interests over individuals’ interests, freedom, and (...) rights. I argue that Gyekye’s and Matolino’s interpretations of Menkiti’s view are mistaken, and that Menkiti’s account of the connection between the community and personhood is a social-moral thesis. This thesis argues that the community provides the norms and material conditions for individuals to live a meaningful life and achieve personhood, and achievingpersonhood involves being integrated into, and contributing positively to the harmony of, the community. (shrink)

For four decades Ifeanyi Menkiti has addressed the question of which sort of community constitutes personhood from a characteristically African perspective. In this chapter, I critically discuss the conceptions of how one acquires personhood through community that Menkiti has advanced, in search of the one that would most enable him to avoid prominent moral objections made to his views over the years. In particular, his account of personhood has been criticized for insufficiently accommodating individual difference, most recently in respect of (...) gender and sexuality. I draw on the resources in Menkiti’s work for rebutting this line of criticism, but contend that, even if he can avoid that one, another, new objection looms large: because of Menkiti’s claim that reciprocity is central to community, he is committed to the view that human infants and mentally incapacitated adults lack moral standing, in the way he explicitly believes animals lack it. After showing that, according to Menkiti’s strongest conception of personhood, one counterintuitively cannot acquire it in the course of interacting with any non-persons, I articulate an alternative conception of how to understand the role of community in acquiring personhood that avoids this problem as well as the other ones discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Menkiti's Moral Man by Oritsegbubemi Anthony OyowePolycarp IkuenobeOYOWE, Oritsegbubemi Anthony. Menkiti's Moral Man. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xii + 221 pp. Cloth, $100.00Oyowe critically examines the various threads in, issues raised by, and implications of Menkiti's maximal conception of personhood, against the backdrop of various criticisms, including his own. He indicates that, as "a repentant critic," he does "not deny the merits of these criticisms," but he (...) is "convinced that there are resources in Menkiti's general account for tackling them."In chapter 1, Oyowe examines how Menkiti uses the idea of community to foreground his normative view of personhood, in order to illuminate the African idea that one is a person because of, and through relationships with, other persons in a community. This indicates that one's existence or [End Page 356] identity has necessary external elements of cultural belonging, in addition to internal intrinsic elements. These cultural elements require ontological progression that involves a process of social-moral incorporation into communal practices and norms. Oyowe argues that while this conception is plausible, it raises questions regarding oppressive cultures and their effects on individuals. He indicates that the kind of person that emerges from this conception is a "soft" social entity.Chapter 2 examines the issue of the nature of the relationship between persons (as soft social entities) and community, and the implications for individual autonomy, practical reasoning, and moral agency. Oyowe argues that the pertinent issue is not whether the individual should have moral or ontological priority over the community or vice versa, but the aspect of individuality that is conducive to what we cherish about the community. This is because Menkiti presupposes that in order to be a maximal person, one must have intrinsic capacities for moral agency to take on communal functions and duties. But the community creates the conditions for individuals to express individuality and autonomy, engage in practical reasoning, and make the choice to conform with communal norms in order to be recognized as persons.So, the maximal conception of personhood raises issues about the nature of entities that deserve a moral status. Chapter 3 examines the moral status of infants, people with cognitive impairment, the senile, nonhuman animals, and the moral duties that people have toward these entities. If we understand personhood as failing to extend moral status to these entities, such a view might be charged with speciesism and anthropocentrism. Oyowe argues that a plausible interpretation of personhood, in the context of the communal priority of duties, suggests that people have certain responsibilities toward human and nonhuman nonpersons. This interpretation is grounded in Menkiti's distinction between "deserving justice"—which is not based on having certain intrinsic properties, moral capacities, or cognitive abilities—and "being a person." Because Menkiti insists that persons ought to be able to use their capacities to perform requisite communal duties, personhood must involve an obligation to consider the interests of nonpersons and a community of respect for those who deserve justice.Chapter 4 examines the dilemma created by the social architecture of a community's cultural traditions, institutions, expectations, norms, and practices that are necessary for personhood and social identity. While such architecture is capable of supporting the achievement of personhood, it could also be restrictive. He uses Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, to illuminate how the structures for recognizing persons that are oppressive of and biased against women could be disguised. Although Menkiti does not address this issue, his conception of personhood highlights the problem of social justice for women because relevant social architecture may exclude women from equal and full communal recognition and participation. An appreciation of this problem [End Page 357] introduces an alternative way of understanding social justice in terms of communal recognition or lack thereof.In chapter 5, Oyowe uses the intuitions underlying Locke's distinction between "person" and "human being" to illuminate Menkiti's account of personhood. Person and human being are not identical because they have different persistent conditions. Persons persist by virtue of mental capacities and practical relevance that are developed after one is identified as a human organism. This raises the issues of (a) whether being a... (shrink)

Dennis Masaka argues that individuals have rights outside those conferred by the community. The argument is a critique to Ifeanyi Menkiti’s view of personhood. He argues that Menkiti uses the word person and personhood as synonymous. Masaka makes a distinction between the two, where person is an ontological concept, and personhood is a normative concept. For Masaka, individuals have rights by virtue of being persons and not personhood. My approach to the paper is therapeutic. I argue that Masaka misinterprets (...) Menkiti’s views. I argue that Menkiti does not allocate rights in his idea of personhood and as something conferred by the community as proposed by Masaka. This implies that Masaka’s view is not radically different from Menkiti’s. (shrink)

“I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am”, generally regarded as the guiding principle of African humanism, expresses the view that a person is a person through other persons and is closely associated but not identical with African communitarianism, or communalism. Against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s “unrestricted or radical or excessive communitarianism” Kwame Gyekye has proposed a “restricted or moderate communitarianism”. Whereas personhood, for Menkiti, is acquired over time, with increasing moral maturation, seniority and agency, Gyekye considers (...) it to arise automatically with being born human. The problem with Menkiti’s account of personhood is that it is at once too wide and too narrow. On the other hand, it remains unclear to what extent Gyekye’s is a communitarian view – and to what extent it is distinctly ‘African’. I conclude with a critical reflection on the implications of African communalism and personhood for non-human animals. Keywords: Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, African Communitarianism, Non-Human Animals, Personhood. (shrink)

We notice a number of interesting overlaps between the views on personhood of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Marya Schechtman. Both philosophers distance their views from the individualistic ones standard in western thought and foreground the importance of extrinsic or relational features to personhood. For Menkiti, it is ‘the community which defines the person as person’; for Schechtman, being a person is to have a place in person-space, which involves being seen as a person by others. But there are also striking differences. (...) Schechtman sees this aspect as expanding the scope of personhood to infants and those who are severely mentally disabled. Menkiti thinks that there is a line to be drawn at some point between those humans that are persons and those who are not. We consider the cases offered in questioning how the dispute between the two views should be resolved. (shrink)

Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose (Happiness from now on) is, among other things, a book about the holistic interrelationship that exists between the concepts of happiness, rationality and ethics. The conception of happiness at issue is, in broad outline, Aristotle's, which is to say that it is about the meaning of life. He referred to this conception as eudaimonia. Perhaps the fundamental guiding question that has motivated me to write Happiness in the first place is ‘Why even bother about being ethical?' (...) After a long period of nihilistic scepticism regarding the possibility of properly addressing this question, I came to see in Aristotle a possible solution, and I ran with it. I am still running. The relevant sense of rationality at issue allows us to claim that we are rational creatures as opposed to the sense that is most directly related to our characterisation of persons as creatures capable of conscious rational thinking. I argue that happiness is a rational ideal, understood as a manner of operating. And this manner of operating cannot properly be understood in isolation from an understanding of the ethic from which human goodness flows. Moreover, I argue that individual happiness cannot be separated from what I characterise as collective eudaimonia and what this in effect means is that the theory of happiness that I advance entails a particular conception of the political domain. The conception at issue, as we shall see, is, in key respects, very un-Aristotelian. That said, it is in an other sense very Aristotelian indeed insofar as I argue that being ethical is constitutive of happiness and, presumably and in some sense, we all want to live happy lives. Being ethical, moreover, involves working to create and perpetuate the social conditions for human flourishing. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(4) 2004: 336-342. (shrink)

This paper considers Tabensky's method of critical introspection, and in particular the conception of personhood that informs it. By interrogating the lives of pure hedonism, divinity and immortality from our already existing conception of personhood, Tabensky argues that such lives are incompatible with what it is to be a person, and desiring to live them is therefore irrational. Concentrating on the example of immortality, I argue that, while there are undoubtedly disadvantages associated with the immortal life, these are contingent rather (...) than essential to the notion of being a person. In fact, we have very little idea of the boundaries of that concept. The paper concludes by looking at the consequences of Tabensky's approach for issues surrounding moral vision and improvement, and new technologies of the person. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(4) 2004: 365-374. (shrink)

This paper argues that Pedro Tabenksy's Aristotelean understanding of true happiness overlooks the constitutive significance of the virtues and values of relationships of radical dependency. Tabensky's focus on the rational and contextual aspects of personhood as the locus for our social interdependence results in friendship relationships being taken as paradigmatic for social engagements. Through a sketch of some of the unique dimensions of the asymmetrical relations upon which our bodily functioning and personal identities inevitably depend, I show that this focus (...) risks perpetuating the lack of recognition of the value and significance of caring relations familiar to us in contemporary societies today. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(4) 2004: 394-401. (shrink)

For caregivers of minimally communicative individuals, providing support in the absence of clearly meaningful responses is ethically fraught. We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from caregivers of individuals who are minimally communicative, including persons with advanced dementia and individuals in disorders of consciousness. Our analysis led to two central claims: (1) Personhood is a threshold concept that is situated, relational, and dynamic and (2) in circumstances in which personhood is difficult to judge, caregivers can “fill the gap” (...) to reach the threshold through a repertoire of strategies. Because personhood is in part an attribution from others, a situational loss of personhood does not preclude restoration, nor does it eliminate moral status. (shrink)

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

Marshalling a mind-numbing array of data, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, shows that on virtually every conceivable measure, civic participation, or what he refers to as “social capital,” is plummeting to levels not seen for almost 100 years. And we should care, Putnam argues, because connectivity is directly related to both individual and social wellbeing on a wide variety of measures. On the other hand, social capital of the “bonding kind” brings with it the (...) ugly side effect of animosity toward outsiders. Given the increasing heterogeneity of our world, the goal therefore must be to enhance connectivity of the “bridging sort,” i.e., connecting across differences. This, in turn, requires that we first clarify what bridging communicative styles looks like. Examining communication as it might transpire in Kant’s kingdom of ends, through the perspective of Habermas’ “communicative action,” and within the scientific community, offers a compelling suggestion that there is a way of communicating such that, if adopted, one would come to view others as if they were persons, i.e., that a bridging communicative style facilitates a kind of bonding that sees through differences toward the commonality of personhood. This paper will briefly explore how communicating toward personhood might be promoted. (shrink)

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of the (...) ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it” 1 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which is underpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. Keywords: African Philosophy, Collective Immortality, Menkiti, It, It-it, Moral Force, Nameless Dead, Personhood. (shrink)

Menkiti’s Moral Man provides an original interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s conception of person, and one that carries significant implications for his metaphysics and moral philosophy. It offers fresh insights on moral agency, moral status, and justice as well as the ontology of living and post-mortem persons in community.

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of the (...) ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it”5 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which isunderpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. (shrink)

This article is a response to Bernard Matolino’s criticisms against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s elucidations on the normative notion of personhood in African philosophy. This article argues that Menkiti’s article is best understood to be ultimately focused on articulating the normative notion of personhood; so understood, Menkiti’s analysis eschews many of the objections made against it by Matolino. We show that the confusion lies in a general failure in African philosophy to distinguish three distinct senses of the notion of a person. We (...) further show how the referent ‘it’ as used to pick out infants by Menkiti, contrary to Matolino’s analysis that suggests that it is an instance of ‘mal-function’ may be charitably construed to be capturing the idea that infants have moral status and/or that they are morally neutral. A defense of Menkiti’s idea of personhood is crucial in a search for a robust African perfectionist ethics. Keywords: ‘It’, Moral agency, Moral Perfectionism, Moral status, Personhood. (shrink)

This article is an examination of a debate between Confucians and Zhuangists surrounding the notion of moral personhood as understood in the early Confucian tradition. This debate takes place across texts—most importantly in the Confucian challenge of Analects 18.5-7 and the Zhuangist response of the Renjianshi chapter of the Zhuangzi. In better understanding the disagreement between these two schools, we can come to a clearer picture of the notion of personhood at stake. The Zhuangist reaction to the Confucian position on (...) personhood helps to demonstrate that the Confucians held a conception of the person as communally constructed. Such a view, I argue, can be of great use in contemporary debates surrounding agency, moral responsibility, and moral development. After offering an outline of the Confucian position, I consider various Zhuangist objections both in the Analects and Renjianshi chapter, before considering what I take to be convincing Confucian responses to the Zhuangist objections. (shrink)

This article is a response to Bernard Matolino’s criticisms against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s elucidations on the normative notion of personhood in African philosophy. This article argues that Menkiti’s article is best understood to be ultimately focused on articulating the normative notion of personhood; so understood, Menkiti’s analysis eschews many of the objections made against it by Matolino. We show that the confusion lies in a general failure in African philosophy to distinguish three distinct senses of the notion of a person. We (...) further show how the referent ‘it’ as used to pick out infants by Menkiti, contrary to Matolino’s analysis that suggests that it is an instance of ‘mal-function’ may be charitably construed to be capturing the idea that infants have moral status and/or that they are morally neutral. A defense of Menkiti’s idea of personhood is crucial in a search for a robust African perfectionist ethics. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur shared Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist and communitarian ideal of a universal community, which ensures that every human being has access to the conditions for self-development as a person. Whereas Mounier talks about communication as the structure of personhood that summons us towards the gradual enlargement of the community, Ricœur’s reflections on translation provide a missing link by referring, not just to the human capacity to communicate, but more specifically, to our capacity to translate and the implied ethics of linguistic (...) hospitality. This allowed him to show that what enables us to enlarge the circle of brotherhood is the capacity to gradually settle in the world of the other and to welcome the other into one’s own world. (shrink)

Neuropalliative care developed to address the needs of patients living with life‐limiting neurologic disease. One critical consideration is that disease‐related changes to cognition, communication, and function challenge illness experiences and care practices. We conducted an ethnography to understand neuropalliative care as a phenomenon; how it was experienced, provided, conceptualized. Personhood served as our conceptual framework; with its long philosophical history and important place in nursing theory, we examined the extent to which it captured neuropalliative experiences and concerns. Personhood contextualized complex (...) losses, aligning the impact of functional and relational changes. Cognition, communication, and functional alterations stretched conceptions of personhood, insinuating it can be relational, fluid, adaptive. Although normative conceptions of personhood guided research and decision‐making, ethical considerations suggested personhood could be transformed, remade. We consider the implications of our findings through three themes. First, we examine how literature on illness experience fails to integrate the realities of people living with and dying from neurologic disease; we counter this by interrogating the concept of experience. Second, we turn to Ricoeur's work on recognition to illuminate relational conceptions of personhood to inform care practices. Finally, we reflect on how personhood can bridge the gap left by functional changes, enhance relational engagement, and promote dignity at the end of life. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a (...) meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematize moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights. (shrink)

An avowed communitarian, Gyekye follows the lead of such African communitarians as Menkiti who believe that the community is ontologically prior to the individual. However, unlike Menkiti and other...

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I (...) argue that, once we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Theories regarding the nature and achievement of personhood in a communitarian context appear to differ in significant respects in the writings of several contemporary African philosophers. Ifeanyi Menkiti seems to regard ethnic differences as sufficient to warrant a national accommodation of multiculturalism with respect to moralities and attendant beliefs. Kwasi Wiredu argues that there is a substantive universal moral principle that undercuts such apparent and relatively superficial diversity. Communitarianism also seems to provide a better framework for explaining how a human (...) being becomes a person than classical liberal theory as enunciated by someone like John Rawls. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

For Hegel, personhood is developed primarily through the possession, ownership, and exchange of property. Property is crucial for individuals to experience freedom as persons and for the existence of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life within a community. The free exchange of property serves to develop individual personalities by mediating our intersubjectivity between one another, whereby we share another’s subjective experience of the object by recognizing their will in it and respecting their ownership of it. This free exchange is grounded the (...) abstract right to property which is defined by the liberal institution of private property. Like all legal/juridical rights, the abstract property right and its related institution are productions of the state, which can also claim priority over them. This prioritization reveals the dialectic inherent in the both the conception and exercise of the right, in which the private right to property at the level of civil society confronts the public right of the state, resulting in both the preservation and uplifting of the right, and, at the same time, its cancellation or annihilation. (shrink)

Scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals are currently developing a variety of new devices under the category of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Current and future applications are both medical/assistive (e.g., for communication) and non-medical (e.g., for gaming). This array of possibilities comes with ethical challenges for all stakeholders. As a result, BCIs have been an object of both hope and concern in various media. We argue that these conflicting sentiments can be productively understood in terms of personhood, specifically the impact of BCIs (...) on what it means to be a person and to be recognized as such by others. To understand the dynamics of personhood in the context of BCI use and investigate whether ethical guidance is required, a meeting entitled "BCIs and Personhood: A Deliberative Workshop" was held in May 2018. In this article, we describe how BCIs raise important questions about personhood and propose recommendations for BCI development and governance. (shrink)

In 21st century America, personhood is under daily assault, sometimes with dire consequences. Scientist, ethicist, and ordained minister Craig C. Malbon encourages the reader to consider such assaults on personhood endured by victims of abortion, ageism, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, gender, gender orientation, racism, sexual preference, identity politics, and our will-to-power over the "other." In exploring personhood status, Malbon poses difficult questions for us. Is personhood assigned as all-or-nothing, or is it a sliding scale based upon (...) criteria arbitrarily aimed at our vulnerabilities? Does the voiceless embryo and fetus have advocates who can speak to the moral question of abortion? Is the personhood of an economically insecure pregnant woman degraded to the point where lack of access to early termination of pregnancy results in "coercive childbearing?" Does being a member of the LGBTQI+ community target one for assaults on personhood, to the extreme of being killed? In delving into the biology and psychology of assaults of "self" upon the "other," Malbon sees powerful linkages of everyday assaults on personhood to darker, profound "original sins" that are foundational to the rise of the American empire, i.e., assaults on the indigenous Native Americans and assaults derivative to the institution of slavery upon Africans, African Americans, and their descendants. (shrink)

I argue that, although it is probably not possible to construct a thoroughly consistent interpretation of Kantian metaphors, there is a perspective in Kant’s later writings which provides a framework for selecting and sorting central metaphors. Following a discussion of the work or Lakoff and Johnson on metaphor, I provide an examination of Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon as an example of a metaphor grounded upon spatio-temporal experience, and conclude with suggestions concerning the role of metaphor in Kant’s account (...) of personhood and community. (shrink)

The communitarian conception of person is a widely accepted view in African thought. Kwame Gyekye thinks there is a distinction between what he calls radical communitarianism and his own version of moderate communitarianism. He is of the view that radical communitarianism is faced with insurmountable problems and ought to be jettisoned in favour of his moderate communitarianism. Gyekye’s strategy is twofold; he firstly seeks to show the shortcomings of radical communitarianism – particularly by attacking Ifeanyi Menkiti’s position. Secondly, he seeks (...) to show the authenticity of his version as well as its serious regard for individual rights as representing a triumph over radical communitarianism. In this paper, I seek to contest both of Gyekye’s strategies. (shrink)

I argue that, although it is probably not possible to construct a thoroughly consistent interpretation of Kantian metaphors, there is a perspective in Kant’s later writings which provides a framework for selecting and sorting central metaphors. Following a discussion of the work or Lakoff and Johnson on metaphor, I provide an examination of Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon as an example of a metaphor grounded upon spatio-temporal experience, and conclude with suggestions concerning the role of metaphor in Kant’s account (...) of personhood and community. (shrink)

Many debates in biomedical ethics today involve inconsistencies in defining the key term, person. Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, beg the question about what constitutes personhood. This book explores the arguments concerning definitions of personhood in the history of modern philosophy, and then constructs a superior model, defined in terms of distinctive features. This model is shown to have distinct advantages over the necessary and sufficient condition models of personhood launched by essentialists. Philosophers historically have been correct (...) about what some of the pivotal distinctive features of personhood are, _e.q._, rationality, communications and self-consciousness, but they have been wrong about the _methods_ of recognizing and asserting personhood, and about the relative importance of feelings. In clinical care, complaints often surface that care is not personal. This book aims to improve care through providing a method of attending to patients as people. Charts in the Appendices show that where physicians attended to personal features important to their patients, sometimes the patients rated the care even higher than the physician did. The book will be useful to health-care providers whose goals include improving quality of care, listening to patients, and preventing malpractice. (shrink)

The ongoing debate among African philosophers on the relation of the individual and the community has spawned radical, moderate, and limited communitarian views. In this paper we will insert the question of interpersonal communication into the individual-community conundrum and raise the discourse to the level of cross-cultural engagement. We will highlight the dominant perspectives in Afro-communitarianism with particular emphasis on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye and the Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti. Expanding the discourse into the domain of intercultural/comparative philosophy, this (...) paper will engage Gyekye and Menkiti’s Afro-communitarianism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical individualism and the resulting conflictual presentation of interpersonal relation. The paper adopts the conversational method. Keywords: Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Afro-communitarianism, community, individual, Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

In the following article I present a basic proposal that is intended to provide the ground for a broader program in which I attempt to explain and characterize the foundations of the normativity generally regarded as implicit in the notion of a "person." I intend to argue that these foundations are natural in the sense that they are derived from basic behavioral and cognitive patterns which are particularly characteristic of human beings especially during their infancy. Among these basic patterns I (...) take that known as dyadic engagement to be merely the foundational stage at which embryonic personhood emerges. Dyadic engagement is a very primitive and special form of social competence which has been identified by some cognitive developmentalists and comparative psychologists as a particular kind of sensitivity for contingencies which are experienced from the very beginning in the various processes of communicative interaction. (shrink)