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• What Is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions by John M. Rist
• Eileen C. Sweeney

John Rist's What Is a Person? is a scholarly, rich, and trenchant study of the history of the concept of personhood in Western thought. However, its sharp critique of modern and postmodern accounts of personhood, though thought-provoking, also uses jarringly polemical language, which further undermines the book's flawed overall argument. The first section, "Constructing the Mainline Tradition," carefully mines ancient and medieval sources, tracing with nuance and complexity the different threads in the notion of person. The threads are religious, philosophical, legal, and literary, and the philosophical sources are multiple. Rist does not privilege Boethius's definition in Contra Eutychem et Nestorium of person as "individual substance of a rational nature" (3) so influential in Christian theology, but explores different approaches from the Stoics and Neoplatonists, as well as from Plato and Aristotle. For example, from Cicero by way of Panaetius we get the four layers of personhood: personhood (1) in virtue of a common nature, (2) as a unique individual, (3) as the subject of historical circumstances we do not choose, and (4) as the professions we do choose (27–28). In the Stoic tradition, the individual person is grasped as "uniquely distinct" with the soul as the "source" of its "essential diachronic unity" (33). Augustine, though not at first, ultimately asserts that the human person is not the soul alone but the "miraculous combination" of body and soul (49), both "objective reality" and "subjective historical structure" (55). Rist argues that these multiple sources get lost in the emphasis on Boethius's definition, especially as these sources are pulled into the Aristotelian framework in the Middle Ages, and that, moreover, as Aristotelianism came under attack, the notion of personhood constructed too exclusively in its terms was further weakened. Rist also points out two important "gaps" in Aquinas: first, the claim that individuals cannot be known but only sensed qua individual, and second, that individuation is through matter (67–68). The latter leaves Aquinas struggling to maintain the individuality of the person, not just the body, and the former fails to recognize, as Augustine did, that we do know individual persons, for example, through biography and history (67–68).

What is compelling about this story is the careful elucidation of multiple strands grounded in very different kinds of philosophical principles. However, this makes the conceit of the book even more surprising and untenable, namely that there is a mainline tradition, all the pieces of which are absolutely necessary and must be combined with the view that the dignity of persons is conferred by the creator God. The mainline tradition is a fiction; even according to Rist himself, it never coalesced. And what did not coalesce it makes no sense to hypostasize as the object of relentless (and mostly construed as malevolent) attacks from Scotus to the present day.

Before he begins his journey through modernity and the nineteenth century toward "the final solution" (from the title of part 4: "Persons Restored or Final Solution," 200), Rist claims that thinkers after Aquinas "have much to contribute" to the mainline tradition. However, he continues, they do not add to or support the "worth" of the person but "merely" add "new information" (69, emphases in the original) because—though Rist never really argues for this claim—it is impossible to establish the worth of persons unless one holds that it is divinely given. Further, Rist's analysis of the modern "contributions" of "new information" (69), even when incisive, is always the story of the undermining of personhood, whether intentionally or in the attempt to save or refound it. Part 2, discussing Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Richardson, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant, is entitled "No God, No Soul: What Person?"—and the answer is clearly "none." Part 3 delves into the "swamp" (Rist's term) of the nineteenth century to find five attempts to "save" the person but which, he says, point "variously to homogenization, debasement and ultimately nihilistic despair as the destiny of the...

审核人：

• 什么是人？现实，建构，幻象，作者：约翰·M·里斯特（John M. Rist）
• 艾琳·斯威尼（Eileen C.Sweeney）

约翰·里斯特（John Rist）的《一个人是什么？是对西方思想中人格概念的历史的学术性，丰富性和鲜明性的研究。然而，尽管对现代人和现代人的人格描述提出了尖锐的批评，尽管这是发人深省的，但它也使用了尖刻的辩论语言，这进一步破坏了本书有缺陷的整体论点。第一部分“构建主线传统”仔细地挖掘了古代和中世纪的资源，以细微差别和复杂性追踪人的观念中的不同线索。线程是宗教的，哲学的，法律的和文学的，而哲学的来源是多种多样的。里斯特（Rist）并不赞同《孔蒂Eutychem et Nestorium》中Boethius的定义人作为“具有理性性质的个体”（3）在基督教神学中具有影响力，但探索了与斯多葛派和新柏拉图主义者以及柏拉图和亚里士多德不同的方法。例如，通过帕奈提乌斯（Panaetius）从西塞罗获得人格的四个层次：人格（1）具有共同性，（2）作为独特的个体，（3）作为历史环境的主体，我们不选择， （4）作为我们选择的职业（27-28）。在斯多葛的传统中，每个人被理解为“独特的”，而灵魂则是其“历时性统一体”的“来源”（33）。奥古斯丁，尽管起初并非如此，但最终断言人不是一个人的灵魂，而是身体和灵魂的“奇迹组合”（49），两者都是“ 就其而言，过于专一的人格观念被进一步削弱。里斯特（Rist）还指出了阿奎那（Aquinas）的两个重要“差距”：首先，声称个人不被认识而只能被感知的说法 就其而言，过于专一的人格观念被进一步削弱。里斯特（Rist）还指出了阿奎那（Aquinas）的两个重要“差距”：首先，声称个人不被认识而只能被感知的说法QUA个体，和第二，个性化是通过物质（67-68）。后者的叶子阿奎那竭力维持的个性的人，不只是身体，而前者没有认识到，奥古斯丁一样，我们也知道个别人士，例如，通过传记和历史（67-68）。

这个故事令人信服的是，仔细阐明了基于非常不同种类的哲学原理的多条线索。但是，这使这本书的自负变得更加令人惊讶和站不住脚，即有一条主线传统，其中的所有内容都是绝对必要的，并且必须与人的尊严由创造者上帝赋予的观点相结合。该主线的传统是虚构的; 即使根据Rist本人，也从未合并。而没有合并的东西就毫无意义地将低估作为从Scotus到今天的无情攻击（并且通常被认为是恶毒的攻击）的对象。

赖斯特声称，在他通过现代主义和19世纪迈向“最终解决方案”（摘自第4部分的标题：“人的还原或最终解决方案”，第200部分）的旅程之前，他认为阿奎那之后的思想家“有很大的贡献”。主线传统。但是，他继续说，他们并没有增加或支持人的“价值”，而是“仅仅”增加了“新信息”。“（69，强调原始内容）是因为-尽管Rist从未真正为这一主张辩护-除非有人认为上帝的价值是神圣的，否则就不可能确立人的价值。此外，Rist对“新信息”（69），即使是尖锐的，也始终是关于破坏人格的故事，无论是有意还是试图挽救或重建它。第二部分，讨论笛卡尔，霍布斯，洛克，理查森，休ume，史密斯，卢梭和康德题为“没有上帝，没有灵魂：什么人？”，答案显然是“没有。”第3部分深入研究了19世纪的“沼泽”（Rist的术语），找到了五种“拯救”的尝试。他说，这个人“同质化程度各不相同，贬低和最终虚无主义的绝望...