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Tag: person

A person is a being, such as a human, that has certain capacities or attributes constituting personhood, which in turn is defined differently by different authors in different disciplines, and less formally by different cultures in different times and places. In ancient Rome, the word “persona” (Latin) or “prosopon” (πρόσωπον: Greek) originally referred to the masks worn by actors on stage. The various masks represented the various “personae” in the stage play. The concept of a “person” was further developed during the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the first through sixth centuries. Since then, a number of important changes to the word’s meaning and use have taken place, and attempts have been made to redefine the word with varying degrees of adoption and influence. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity: both about what makes any particular person that particular…