Outline of a Theory of the Person for Historical-Biographical Study

Abstract

Looking at the way the person is studied and conceptualized in the humanities in general, and in historical-biographical studies in particular, many shortcomings become visible, which in my view prompts a serious epistemological, metaphysical and normative interest in the person. Recent studies in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and Post-analytic philosophy have made strong headway in our understanding of the person.To be more specific, I believe that the results and insights from these studies can be incorporated into a holistic and normative theory of the person. Holistic because I argue that the person is best understood as being composed of elements and relations of many orders, and a sufficiently large amount of them are interrelated. The view is normative for two reasons: first, as in non-objective, because the theory’s validity stems only from a certain epistemological perspective. Second, it is normative as in prescriptive, that is, I am arguing that any scholar in the humanities studying the person should take this theory to be delineating the necessary, appropriate and justified presuppositions for the study of the person. The theory gives us a proper direction, which entails that several other current and fashionable directions are seen as inadequate. An outline of the theory, the systematic account of which is part of a larger project of mine, will be given in this essay.