From a Doctoral Thesis to a Book
What you hold in your hands is the essence of my dissertation, recast in new language. The dissertation was written at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and bore the title: “What Is Human Personhood? The Human Being in the Field of Tension Between the Oblivion of the Person and Inalienable Ontological Dignity” (German original: „Was ist menschliches Personsein? Der Mensch im Spannungsfeld von Personvergessenheit und unverlierbarer ontologischer Würde”). It was supervised by Prof. Walter Schweidler and Prof. Günther Pöltner.
A doctoral thesis in philosophy is not an easy book. It is full of technical terms, references, and distinctions that matter to the trained reader but remain inaccessible to the untrained one. That is a pity. For the question at stake — What is the human being? — is not a specialist’s question. It concerns everyone. Everyone carries it within him, whether he knows it or not. The grandfather who wonders whether his friend suffering from dementia is still “the same.” The expectant mother who wants to know what is growing within her. The teenager who wonders who he actually is. At heart, they are all asking the same question.
That is why I decided to write down the results of my research in such a way that no degree in philosophy is needed to understand them. No technical term without an explanation. No presupposition left unstated. Step by step, so that anyone willing to engage with the question can think along.
In this I am not alone. The collaboration with an artificial intelligence, which assisted me as a tool in the writing, shows that research today can be translated into new forms.1 The thoughts, the arguments, the convictions are my own — they come from years of research and from a deep personal conviction. But the clear, simple language in which they are cast is also to the credit of this new way of writing. I see no contradiction between this and philosophy — on the contrary: if a thought is true, it must also be possible to say it simply.
Continue reading: What This Book Says →
Fußnoten
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The LLM used was Claude by Anthropic, following this methodology: Negro (2025). ↩