What Is a Person? : Untapped Insights from Africa

What makes us 'persons' in the moral sense, beings with a certain dignity and worth?Philosophers Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire explore this question by bringing African and Western philosophies into conversation.They start by characterizing the differences in the contemporary scene in Africa and the West, proposing that these differences were not always present, are hardly inevitable, and can and should be bridged.They then introduce the concept of Emergent Personhood, a new philosophy of personhood that combines insights from Africa and the West.It holds that beings with superlative worth emerge through social relational processes involving human beings, yet they are more than the sum of these relationships.Persons have an identity of their own and exhibit superlative moral worth, a remarkable feature not present at the base.Emergent Personhood justifies personhood for all human beings from birth to death.It also gives strong support to personhood for a wide range of animals, s