Raphael Bexten is the author of the dissertation underlying the book, Was ist menschliches Personsein? Der Mensch im Spannungsfeld von Personvergessenheit und unverlierbarer ontologischer Würde (engl.: What Is Human Personhood? The Human Being between Forgetfulness of the Person and Inalienable Ontological Dignity; KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt 2017). He advocates a substance-ontological-relational concept of person — in the sense of a differentiation of levels between the ontological constitution of the person (substance with an essential potency for relation) and its phenomenological-ethical mode of disclosure (recognition, “only in the plural”) — in the tradition of Spaemann, Wojtyła, and Seifert, and develops the performative contradiction as the central objection to the empirical-functionalist concept of person of Singer and Locke.
Key Contribution
Bexten shows: whoever ties personhood to actual rational capacities performs, in the very act of arguing, precisely what he denies to other beings. This self-refutation is not a matter of content but performative — it lies not in the what of the statement but in the performance of asserting.
Recognition as a Category of Response
On the phenomenological side of this concept of person stands the category of recognition. It is more than cognitive apprehension: the responsive attitude in which another is received as someone (not as something) — in being seen, being addressed, being taken seriously. Bexten here takes up Spaemann’s dictum “persons exist only in the plural” (Personen gibt es nur im Plural) without surrendering the differentiation of levels: recognition does not constitute personhood, but it lets it come to the fore. It is therefore not a category of constitution but a category of response — and precisely for that reason the fundamental ethical norm of every encounter between persons: a response to what the other, by his nature, already is.
The Book (2026)
The book Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht (engl.: What Makes the Human Human; 2026) is a thorough reworking and expansion of the dissertation. It addresses a broad readership and unfolds the personalist ontology in 67 sections — from the preface to the outlook. The performative contradiction against the empirical-functionalist concept of person is a new development, incorporated into the book in the wake of Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, and is not found in this form in the dissertation.
The Ontology of Human Personhood
In the background of the book project, a formal ontology of human personhood is taking shape — a systematic network of concepts that transfers the philosophical insights into a logically rigorous structure checked for freedom from contradiction. The 364 networked concept pages of this website are derived from this ontology. See About the Project: An Ontology of Human Personhood.
Place in the Book
Bexten’s concept of person is systematically developed in Chapter 4: Personhood (German) and unfolded toward its ethical consequences in Chapter 5: Forgetfulness of the Person (German).