A concept is a unit of meaning that grasps something determinate. The dissertation carefully distinguishes between the act of conceiving (the enactment of conceiving) and the conceptual content (that which is conceived). This distinction is fundamental for clarifying the concept of person (Bexten 2017, pp. 65 ff.).
Act of Conceiving and Conceptual Content
- Act of conceiving: The mental enactment through which a knowing subject conceives something
- Conceptual content: That which is grasped in the act of conceiving — the substantive content of the concept
The conceptual content is not identical with the word: different words can carry the same conceptual content, and the same word can have different conceptual contents.
Conceptual Intension and Conceptual Extension
The dissertation analyzes the relation between conceptual intension (the content of meaning) and conceptual extension (the range of designated objects) (Bexten 2017, pp. 69 ff.). For the concept of person this is decisive: the extension (“Who is a person?”) depends on the intension (“What does ‘person’ mean?”).
Is the Concept a Spiritual Entity?
The question of the mode of being of the concept is treated in section 3.2.3 (Bexten 2017, pp. 68 ff.). The concept is not a merely subjective construction but grasps — when it is adequate — something in the matter itself. Adolf Reinach and Edmund Husserl emphasize the intentionality of conceiving: the concept is directed toward something.
Adequate and Inadequate Concept
An adequate concept of person grasps the essence of the person; an inadequate concept misses it. Peter Wust speaks of the “mind’s taking measure from things”: the act of reason must orient itself to the matter itself, not to prescriptions.
Eighteen Meanings of “Person”
The dissertation identifies eighteen distinct meanings of the word “person” (Bexten 2017, pp. 59 ff.) and shows that the ambiguity of the word is an essential cause of confusion in the debate about personhood.
Adequate Concept
An adequate concept is a concept whose content grasps the essential characteristics of its object completely and appropriately. In the context of analyzing the concept of person, the decisive question arises: which of the historically available concepts of person is adequate? That is: which one grasps the essence of the person such that no essential determination is missing and nothing alien to the essence is added? (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 53—75)
The dissertation shows that the substance-ontological-relational concept of person constitutes the adequate concept of person. It grasps the essential characteristics of the person by including both the substantial mode of being (the person as ens per se) and the relational dimension (the person as a being ordered toward community). Inadequate concepts, by contrast, single out only partial aspects — for instance, only self-consciousness or only rationality. They thereby miss the whole of personhood. The tradition from Alexander of Hales to Thomas Aquinas forms the background of this conceptual clarification.
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Concept of Person
- has subclass: Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person
- (inverse) domain: captures essential characteristics
Capture of the Essential Characteristics
Ontological relation: An adequate concept captures the relevant essential characteristics of the entity meant. This is the criterion of conceptual adequacy: a concept of person is adequate precisely when it is able to grasp conceptually the eight essential characteristics of the person. The substance-ontological-relational concept of person satisfies this criterion. The relation is methodologically grounded in essential intuition: the essential characteristics are not arbitrarily posited but read off the entity itself in phenomenological analysis (cf. Bexten 2017, chs. 2–3). An inadequate concept misses at least one essential characteristic and therefore leads to theoretical oblivion of the person — for instance, when substantiality or relationality is conceptually obscured.
- Domain: Adequate Concept
- Range: Essential Characteristic
Adequacy of the Concept of Person
Ontological relation: Marks which concept of person best intends, in a meaning-directed way, the in-itself-being of the person. The ontology concludes: the substance-ontological-relational concept of person is the adequate concept for the human person, because it grasps both the substantiality and the relationality of the person in their essence (cf. Bexten 2017, ch. 3).
- Domain: Substance-Ontological-Relational Concept of Person
- Range: Human Person
Act of Conceiving
The act of conceiving is the psychic act of concept formation, i.e., the mental process enacted in the knowing subject through which a concept is formed or grasped. As a real enactment it belongs to the ontologically autonomous domain of thinking and is to be strictly distinguished from the conceptual content (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 53—60).
The act of conceiving as a subjective enactment is bound to the knowing person and arises and passes away with her. The conceptual content, by contrast, possesses a validity independent of the act.
This distinction is of methodological significance for the analysis of the concept of person. Different thinkers can grasp the same conceptual content in distinct acts of conceiving. Whether a concept of person is adequate is decided by its content, not by the act. The act of conceiving itself is a personal act of cognition that finds its completion in judgment.
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Concept of Person
Conceptual Extension
Conceptual extension (also: extension) denotes the range of a concept — the set of all objects to which the concept applies. In the case of the concept of person, the extension determines who counts as a person. The dissertation makes clear that the extension depends on the conceptual intension: depending on which content of meaning one assigns to the concept of person, the set of persons turns out differently (Bexten 2017, pp. 69 ff.). An empirical-functionalist concept of person excludes human beings who cannot (yet) exercise certain capacities — a substance-ontological concept of person, by contrast, does not.
Conceptual Content
The conceptual content is the ontologically heteronomous content of a concept, i.e., that which a concept means, as distinct from the psychic enactment of conceiving (act of conceiving). As an ontologically heteronomous object the conceptual content does not exist for itself but owes its intentional being to the cognitive act, while at the same time possessing an objective validity that reaches beyond the individual act (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 53—60).
Within the analysis of the concept of person, the distinction between act of conceiving and conceptual content is methodologically decisive. One can ask whether the content of a given concept of person grasps the person adequately in her essence or hits only partial aspects.
The conceptual content is further articulated into conceptual intension (what the concept aims at) and conceptual extension (which entities it applies to). An adequate concept is present when its content completely grasps the essential characteristics of the conceptual target.
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Concept of Person
Conceptual Intension
Conceptual intension (also: intension) denotes the content of meaning of a concept — that which the concept aims at in terms of content, what it means. The dissertation shows that conceptual intension logically precedes conceptual extension: only once it is clarified what is meant by “person” can one determine who is a person (Bexten 2017, pp. 69 ff.). For the concept of person this is of decisive importance: an insufficient conceptual intension leads to a mistaken extension and thereby to grave ethical consequences. Cognition of the correct conceptual intension presupposes that one orients oneself to the matter itself.
Logical Meaning
Logical meaning belongs to the archphenomena of the entity: it is an objective content of thought that is really distinct from the psychological acts of thinking (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 117 ff.).
The proposition “2 + 2 = 4” expresses a logical meaning that holds independently of whether anyone thinks it. Seifert, following Husserl and Bolzano, shows that logical meanings are neither physical things nor merely psychic acts but possess their own mode of being. They are objects of cognition but not brought forth by cognition. Reason grasps them but does not create them. For the ontology of the person this is significant: the person’s capacity to know logical meanings and to render judgments about states of affairs belongs to her essential spiritual enactments. The truth of a judgment consists in agreement with the objective state of affairs — not in subjective conviction.
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Archphenomenon
- is a subclass of: Entity
Concept of the Human
The concept of the human denotes what we understand by “human being” — and stands in immediate connection with the concept of person. The dissertation shows that the human being is essentially a person: every human person is a person from the beginning, not only through the acquisition of certain capacities (Bexten 2017, pp. 59 ff.). The concept of the human encompasses the body-soul unity of the human being and his basal relations — it is not reducible to the biological but points to the spiritual nature of the human being as person.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Transl. J. N. Findlay. London/New York: Routledge, 2001 (on the intentionality of conceiving and on logical meaning).
- Reinach, Adolf (1913): Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes. In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (German) (on the intentionality of the act of conceiving).
- Seifert, Josef. Back to ‘Things in Themselves’. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987 (on the objective validity of logical meanings).
- Wust, Peter (1937): Ungewissheit und Wagnis. Salzburg/Leipzig: Anton Pustet (German) (on the “mind’s taking measure from things”).
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 1–4 (on the conceptual clarification of the concept of person).