Nature’s Personhood and Property’s Virtues

Population, development, and human natures

At the dawn of this new millennium, the human enterprise is quickly becoming a globally unified one. Yet numerous obstacles and pitfalls remain in the path of a full and fair unification. A substantial fraction of the world’s population is well-off and increasingly connected through trade and communications systems. But an even larger fraction is struggling to make ends meet and is only sketchi...

Natures and Perspectives

“Nature” and “Perspective” have similar meaning for Eclipse developers and for personnel in a software product line organization. The nature of product line work differs from one part of the organization to another. A developer using Eclipse switches among perspectives to have ready access to the specific tools needed for the nature of the current work such as testing, modeling, or plug-in deve...

Simplicity, personhood, and divinity

In contemporary philosophy of religion, it is customary to think of God as an individual person, who exists in time, and is related to things in the world not only as their cause but also in various respects as their effect.1 On the whole, this model has displaced the so-called 'classical' account, according to which God is pure being and therefore 'simple'. Two kinds of consideration lie behin...

Interrogating personhood and dementia

OBJECTIVES To interrogate the concept of personhood and its application to care practices for people with dementia. METHOD We outline the work of Tom Kitwood on personhood and relate this to conceptualisations of personhood in metaphysics and in moral philosophy. RESULTS The philosophical concept of personhood has a long history. The metaphysical tradition examines the necessary and suffici...

The Natures of Nonconfigurationality