Abstract

Defining the "person" is not an easy task and not even a direct possibility. One cannot generate a definition with tremendous implications without properly understanding the ontological makeup of "person". From this point of view philosophy and science have more or less proven that they aren’t able to share the same conclusions regarding the ontological features of “person”. In part because philosophy and science do not share the same general concept of reality. As long as there is a debate regarding the nature of reality and, inevitably, of what can be incorporated within such reality it is almost impossible to find a common ground. But disagreements with respect to the ultimate nature of reality occur within the field of philosophy for here too, there isn’t one, but multiple accounts of reality. On their turn philosophical accounts of reality differ dramatically and in some cases are fundamentally opposed. To some extent, the same can be claimed about science. Psychology is certainly under different epistemological constraints than cosmology. Therefore, when one speaks about “persons” he has first to account that the divide between fields and within the fields is already a serious obstacle in defining the ‘person”. Ideally, a definition of “person” should emerge from a unified conceptual paradigm but that is an epistemological ambition almost impossible to fulfill in the current context. In the absence of a common epistemological ground the task of identifying and describing the features of “person” is almost impossible to accomplish. If however we put aside the debate regarding the ultimate nature of reality while adopting at the same a phenomenological realistic attitude, we could at least begin to formulate some of the epistemological qualifiers which may be beneficial for our task. It is certainly the absence of such qualifiers that blocks a coherent philosophical investigation into the ontological makeup of “person”. I believe that in order to overcome such conceptual crisis we should first identify its philosophical origins and sketch some of the premises which will later lead not only to the conception of proper qualifiers, but also to a proper epistemological approach on “person”.