"Human Persons – A Process View" Anne Sophie Meincke (University of Exeter)

What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question given by Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are and exist as substances, i.e., as some sort of discrete particular whose identity is determined by a certain set of intrinsic essential characteristics. In my talk I want to suggest an alternative view which is motivated by metaphysi¬cal considerations about persistence as well as by recent insights from systems biology and the theory of cognition derived from it (‘enactivism’). If we take seri¬ously that at least human persons are living dynamical systems, embedded in a natural environment and for their existence at a time as well as through time de¬pendent on an interaction with that environment, we are led to recognise them as organised and stabilised higher-order processes rather than as substances in the traditional sense.