Who are you?

Who I am is how I feel, and what I am is what I think.

Then what are other persons? Can you even know other people?

We can only think we know others, since people are infinites and beyond true knowledge... And if we could know them there would be no reason for a relationship...If we know someone well enough to dislike them, we avoid them...As we give and grow, we want others with us who can give and grow, and in a good relationship growth and change are taken for granted.

The self is over-rated today. To the point of hubris. The self is a criminal or an obscene evil power, according to experts on the self like Doestoevsky and Nietzsche.



According to the modern self human nature is irrational, unintelligible or even non-existent. The self without natural teleology or divinity as a guide, is the mere expression of nihilism. If there is no 'mankind' to speak of anymore, then the individual, as individual, escapes the grasp of reason and falls into a pit.

This self is an underground basement/rat-hole phenomenon breeding cynicism, neuroses and spiritual home-sickness. And if the disease weren't so widespread it would be laughable.


Only a return to great politics, the advent of Ceasarism, a hollow-cost, environmental catastrophe, civil war, nuclear armageddon etc., could save them from the little mocking joke that has become their selves.

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Personal Identity has become a widely debated topic especially since the rise of modernism, with the term "person" becoming rather exclusive to referring mostly to humanity, but has this always been the case?

I would like to get a wide consensus on what actually entails personhood, and maybe get some different ideas concerning the existence or non-existence of the "self."

What do the terms "person," "individual" and "human being" mean to you, and are they interchangeable?

It is not what those words mean to me that counts. It is what those words mean. "Human being" is a biological term. It refers to those who have human DNA. "Person" is what John Locke called, a "forensic term". A person has certain rights and duties, both legal and moral. Some human beings are not persons. For instance, the very feeble-minded. A fetus. And, some persons might not be human beings. Mr. Spock of Star Trek was only part human being, but he was a person. Martians (if there are any) might be persons, but not human beings. An "individual" means a particular person.

The meanings for words change over time. Person as a persistently existing entity is a relatively new concept. Which is why God is described as three persons in one. This wasn't an attempt at any forensic explanation for God being three beings in one, this was three different manifestations of God.

Person derives from persona, which also serves a different meaning in language today. Persona derives from the Greek word prosopon, which was a term to describe the face of something, like a mask. So personhood for the Greeks was a manifestation of the soul, and not something that could be objectively studied or observed.

I agree with what you said, but that still leaves questions unanswered such as:



Is a person the same over the course of his life, or does that person change, and if that person changes, should what the person changed into be punished for acts committed prior to that change?

Of course meanings change. But how does that imply that a word does not have the meaning it has at a particular time? The etymology of a word has nothing to do with the word's present meaning. For the reason you just gave. Meanings change through time.

Linguists make a sharp distinction between diachronic and synchronic meaning. Meaning through time, and meaning in the present. You are confusing them.

Persons are the same all through their life, and they change too. If they were not the same, there would be nothing to change. But, how to understand persistence through change is the philosophic task. Aristotle's idea was to distinguish between essential qualities and accidental qualities. But I don't think that works very well because it is difficult to distinguish between the two kind of qualities. Thare are other ideas, though.

I don't think we can only go by what words mean today, because their current meaning is an evolved form of their original meaning. I wouldn't say they are two sharply distinct and separate meanings. They are necessarily related to each other.

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That's like saying that we cannot know what kind of animal a horse is today, because it is an evolved form of the original animal is evolved from.

That's like saying that we cannot know what kind of animal a horse is today, because it is an evolved form of the original animal is evolved from.

Have we not learned more about the horse by understanding the evolution of the horse?

I would argue that we can never truly know the horse, but our understanding of the horse today is greater because the information learned by studying the evolution of the horse.

Everything in the present has traces of the past in it, so by studying the past of a thing, you will learn more about its preset. There are things that can be learned by studying the past of a thing that cannot be learned by studying a thing's present alone.

We are not looking at historical documents so much as translations and explanations of documents, but from reasing translations of Aristotle and Plato, I think their arguments are pretty cohesive and well laid out with enough explanation to be understood...

But the horse today is different from what it evolved from. That we can learn more about the horse today by knowing how it evolved is certainly true. Nevertheless, they are not the same. The same is true of words. For instance, we are often told that "philosophy" means, "the love of wisdom" because that is its ancient Greek etymology. But, (1) It does not follow that because that is what it used to mean in ancient Greek, that is what it means today. And (2) in fact, that is not what it means today. And (1) follows from (2).

Shetland pony; Black Frisian horse; arabs; etcetera.:whoa-dude:

Mustang:lol: