A necessary constitutive feature of personhood. There is no person without life. Life belongs necessarily to personhood. Ontologically, life is an act — an actuality that unfolds in various degrees.
Personal ontology distinguishes Biological Life, Spiritual Life, Rational Life, and Personal Life. Decisive is the thesis of the dissertation: in the case of the human person, biological and personal life cannot be distinguished realiter et formaliter — human life is always personal life. There is no stage at which a human being is biologically alive yet not yet a person (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 160–178).
Ontological classification:
- Genus: Act
- Species: Biological Life, Spiritual Life, Rational Life, Personal Life
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 18 (on life and its degrees)
- Aristotle: De anima, Book II (on the soul as the principle of life)
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (on the identity of life and personhood)