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PERSONA
Also known as: person
Facts (22)
Sources
Dualism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2016 Edition) plato.stanford.edu Aug 19, 2003 6 facts
claimE. J. Lowe is a substance dualist who holds that a normal human being involves two substances: a body and a person.
claimE. J. Lowe's theory of substance dualism differs from René Descartes's because Lowe does not define the person as a purely mental substance defined solely by thought or consciousness.
claimThe argument against the bundle theory of the self states that if the bundle theory were true, it should be possible to identify mental events independently of or prior to identifying the person or mind to which they belong; since it is not possible to identify mental events in this way, the bundle theory is false.
claimIt is philosophically unclear whether a person would remain the same individual if their biological origin involved a different, though genetically identical, sperm from the same father.
claimE. J. Lowe argues that the bundle theory is untenable because it presupposes that the identity conditions of psychological modes can be provided without relying on reference to persons, whereas the identity of any psychological mode actually depends on the identity of the person who possesses it.
claimE. J. Lowe defends the argument against the bundle theory by asserting that psychological modes are essentially modes of persons, and therefore persons can be conceived of as substances.
Mind and Consciousness - St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology saet.ac.uk Jun 20, 2024 4 facts
claimIn contemporary philosophy of mind, the term 'mind' is frequently used to refer to a person, self, or subject.
claimIt is widely held that persons, subjects, minds, or souls are conscious, but the state of consciousness itself is not conscious, similar to how persons engage in activities like thinking or running, but the activities themselves are not thinking or running.
perspectiveSome contemporary theologians argue that there are compelling biblical and theological reasons to believe that created persons are physical beings with mental aspects.
claimThe 'problem of other minds' is the philosophical challenge of determining whether other individuals are truly persons, selves, or subjects, or if they are mindless creatures known as zombies.
Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 4 facts
claimP.F. Strawson defines the concept of a person as 'primitive' by asserting it is logically prior to the concepts of 'subject' and 'body,' meaning persons are not compounds of subjects and bodies.
quoteDerek Parfit identifies two prominent reductionist claims: first, that 'a person’s existence consists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental event'; and second, that '[t]hough persons exist, we could give a complete description of reality without claiming that persons exist.'
referenceHarry Frankfurt authored 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person' in 'The Journal of Philosophy' in 1971.
claimP.F. Strawson argues that the concept of a person is primitive, contrasting this position with Cartesian dualism and the 'no-ownership view'.
A Survey of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs - arXiv arxiv.org 3 facts
claimCastricato et al. (2025) presented PERSONA, a dataset containing 1,586 synthetic personas for LLM agents.
claimCastricato et al. (2025) developed 'PERSONA', a reproducible testbed designed for pluralistic alignment in large language models.
referenceYu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen, Chao-Wei Huang, Yu Meng, and Yun-Nung Chen authored 'Two tales of persona in LLMs: A survey of role-playing and personalization', published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 16612–16631, in Miami, Florida, USA, in November 2024.
Developing youth work: Chapter 5 - Beyond social education infed.org 1 fact
quoteRichard Pring (1984) argues that for a school or youth work unit to be effective, it requires 'a careful, philosophical reflection upon what it means to be a person, how development as a person is inextricably linked with a form of social life, and where moral values and ideas are presupposed in both'.
Self-Consciousness - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Jul 24, 2024 1 fact
quoteJohn Locke defined a person as "a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places."
Dualism, Physicalism, and Philosophy of Mind - Capturing Christianity capturingchristianity.com Dec 11, 2019 1 fact
perspectiveThe author of the Capturing Christianity article prefers the view that a person is a soul that maintains a special causal relationship with their body, rather than viewing a person as a composite of body and soul.
Self, selfhood and understanding - infed.org infed.org 1 fact
referenceVivien Burr's 1995 book 'An Introduction to Social Constructionism' provides an introduction to debates surrounding socially constructed notions of the person.
The Compatibility of Christianity with Panpsychism, Part 1 theologycommons.gcu.edu Sep 2, 2025 1 fact
perspectiveThe author of 'The Compatibility of Christianity with Panpsychism, Part 1' argues that the Bible rejects physicalism because physicalism implies that a human is solely their physical body, meaning the person ceases to exist when the body dies, which contradicts the biblical concept of the person living on after the body dies.