This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

The present chapter discusses agreement in Slavic languages. Slavic languages are interesting because of their canonical subject-verb agreement, which offers a direct insight into this core syntactic relation (syntactic agreement). Additionally, Slavic languages feature well-documented agreement alternations, which suggest involvement of other language components in agreement (semantic and discourse agreement). Finally, strictly local agreement, often devoid of alternations, operating inside the nominal phrase commands theoretical interest.

Chapter 4 explores mood systems and structures. It concentrates on paradigmatic relations – and the ways in which these can be motivated in the grammars of English, Spanish and Chinese. This chapter foregrounds questions about the nature of functional language typology, when confronted with the diverse structural realisations of mood in three different languages. It highlights the need to focus on system rather than structure, on higher ranks rather than lower ones and ultimately on discourse semantics rather than grammar by way of establishing comparable ground whenever languages are being contrasted and compared.

Intro: The introduction surveys the definition of “lyric” and the aspects of lyric poetry and lyric episodes in prose that run throughout the book, such as slowness, suspension, detail, and person, along with irony and reasoning. It also sketches out the human abilities elicited by the examined texts.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the human abilities addressed throughout the book and adumbrates the notion of "person" that underlies these abilities.

As a nurse, you will be called upon to support, care for and protect people who are vastly different from yourself. How you respond to the diversity of human beings will be a measure of your own humanity as well as your professionalism. The NMBA Code of Conduct and the ICN Code of Ethics are designed to support you in this. Certainly, caring does not come as easily to some nurses as it does to others. After all, it is not always pleasant being around incapacitated, sick or grieving people. So why do people want to support the ill or incapacitated? What is it about human nature that causes people to care for each other at all?

This chapter argues that there are two key errors in the classical natural law tradition: first, that the ultimate end of all human actions is happiness instead of doing justice and loving the intrinsic good for its own sake; second, that our relationship to the good consists above all in desiring it, instead of giving goods an adequate response of will and heart. Grounding natural law on natural inclinations in this way commits the naturalistic fallacy: the moral ought is derived from facts about human desires. Drawing on realist phenomenology, the chapter secures natural law and human rights with an account of intrinsic objective values perceived by human reason. The intrinsic and objective value, or dignity, of human persons grounds a strict ethical obligation (natural law) to respect that dignity, and act with an appropriate value response. The appropriate value response is the object of a person’s fundamental human rights. The scope and hierarchy of human rights proceeds from this ethical obligation to respect human dignity in its various manifestations: ontological dignity, the dignity of conscious and rational persons, acquired dignity and bestowed dignity.

This chapter argues that natural law duties and corresponding human rights require attention to moral and metaphysical frameworks, and education into moral traditions sustaining those frameworks. If such traditions are eclipsed, or lost for a time, there will be deformations in our understanding and language concerning the relationship between the self and the moral universe around us; and, thus, to our understanding and application of human rights. In particular, the chapter examines the shift in language from ‘virtue’ to ‘values’ and ‘person’ to ‘individual’. It explores how the abstracted concepts of ‘values’ and ‘individual’ create confusions in the application of human rights. Instead, it is argued that the moral language supporting human rights application should be sustained within a metaphysical tradition. And, for such traditions to thrive, they require subsidiarity for what Habermas calls ‘life-worlds’ – the many and varied voluntary associations that make up human life in community. Without commitment to subsidiarity, the pursuit of mere techné will undercut the moral sources embedded within those life-worlds, which nourish understanding of and respect for human rights.

The Catholic Church holds the concept of natural law in reference to a created order. While this concept has been put aside in philosophy and science the Church deems that creation implies an inherent relationship between all its components. The Social doctrine of the Church is built on the concept of natural law accessible to human intelligence. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas drawing from Aristotle remains the main source of Catholic understanding of natural law. Natural law and natural rights are not to be confused. Right refers to a natural order of things, which is the natural law apprehended by reason at a given moment. The source of human rights is entailed in a measure inscribed in the order created by God. So natural rights are determined on the basis of what constitutes a just relationship between persons in accordance with natural law. The attention given today to the ecosystem including the biosphere and human society altogether brings us back to the core of natural law. The ecosystem witnesses to an order which pre-exists to our attempts to use it arbitrarily. ’Integral ecology’ apprehends the human being in its interdependence with the created order of the universe.

This chapter unpacks the dense statement that Kierkegaard gives of his ontology of the self at the start of The Sickness unto Death. It considers the claims that the self is a synthesis of factors that stand in tension with one another (the finite and the infinite, etc.); that it is not simply a relation but a dynamic, continuing process of relating to itself; that it is only able to be this because it relates to another (God); and that selfhood, so considered, is a goal which human beings fall short of attaining. Throughout, Kierkegaard’s thought is explicated by comparison and contrast with other philosophical accounts of the self, referring to Descartes, Locke, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre and Frankfurt; and the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard’s account to recent discussions of selfhood, the relation of the self or person to the human being, and the extent to which the self can be thought of as self-constituted is emphasized.

Chapter 1 examines behavioural coherence as a marker of both fictional and actual identity. Concentrating on the recognition scenes in Medea and Thyestes, this chapter contends that Senecan recognition is less about revelation than about validation of an identity achieved through consistent, habitual conduct. It discusses key concepts of decorum and Stoic persona-theory as ways of evaluating Atreus‘ and Medea’s self-construction. It also demonstrates how such behavioural repetition has gone largely unnoticed, as scholars have focused instead on the textual repetition highlighted by dominant methods of intertexual analysis.

The Introduction sets forth the book’s main parameters and situates its study within the current landscape of Senecan scholarship. In addition, it provides a detailed overview of major theoretical approaches to literary character from the late nineteenth century to the present, arguing against the limitations inherent in both the formalist/structuralist method of character criticism, and the humanist/psychological method, and proposing instead a blended theory of character that recognises both structural and person-like qualities. The final section of the Introduction narrows focus to theatrical contexts and considers how stage performance affects the presentation and reception of fictional character.

This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively over recent decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case study in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies concerns the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflexional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.