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BOOK REVIEWS 317 la doctrina theologie selon Thomas d'Aquin," in What is "Theology" in the Middle Ages? (Aschendorff, 2007). The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. KEVIN WHITE Persons: The Difference between 'Someone' and 'Something'. By ROBERT SPAEMANN. Translated by OLIVER O'DONOVAN. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-9281817 . The concept of the person is hardly a mere matter of esoteric philosophical speculation. After its early development in the Trinitarian and Christological controversies, through the "personalist" defense ofthe person against totalitarian and individualist ideologies in the twentieth century, it is now the key to many, if not most bioethical debates, from abortion to brain death and euthanasia. Robert Spaemann, a well-known German philosopher, has been one of the few outspoken intellectuals in defense of a traditional notion of personhood in his own country. The last chapter of the present book gives a short summary of some of the points he has been making throughout the recent years in German publications on abortion, euthanasia, and other topics. This book, however, seeks to do more; it is an investigation into the philosophical understanding of personhood. The title of the last chapter is: "Are All Human Beings Persons?" And this is indeed the key question. If ethicists ask whether embryos or people in a coma are persons, they are not usually denying their humanity, butthey are distinguishing their human nature from personhood, which they identify with mere consciousness. Only conscious human beings are therefore persons and enjoy human rights; the loss of consciousness would be a loss of personhood and its rights. This position, exemplified prominently by ethicists like Peter Singer, has led to the demand that human rights should be replaced by person-rights. Anything else supposedly would be unjustified privileging of the human nature or species, which Singer calls "speciecism" (analogous to "racism"); in his opinion, human beings without consciousness (including infants) can be inferior even to pigs. Singer expects that a defense of human rights comes by way of an identification of person and (human) nature. It might come as a surprise therefore, that historically the concept of "person" developed precisely in distinction from that of "nature," namely, in the early theological controversies around the Trinity and Christology: that God is three persons within one divinity and that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures demands a 318 BOOK REVIEWS conceptual distinction. Nevertheless, in Boethius's epochal definition (although not unchallenged in the Middle Ages), person is the subsistence of a rational nature, and therefore not without that nature. Following a first chapter on typical and significant linguistic uses of the term "person," Spaemann reflects on this complex historical context in his second chapter. He emphasizes the distinction between nature and person with interesting discussions of the linguistic use of the concepts, the literary phenomenon of metamorphosis (i.e., change of nature), the ways we count or identify persons, and how they do not fall under a class-concept in the same way as do members of other species. All of this is evidence of how persons are not their nature, but have it. This characterization can be surprising or even confusing given the problematic contemporary discussion, especially if the having of a nature is combined with a conscious and intentional leading of one's life. It could seem to strengthen a definition ofpersonhoodthrough consciousness, in distinction from nature. Yet at the same time Spaemann strongly argues that human nature implies personhood. The reason for this tension is the need to defend personhood from naturalistic reductions. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen various forms of "personalism" (often derived from M. Scheler), which-not entirely different from existentialism-defined the concept of person in square opposition to the concept of nature, the latter understood as "merely cosmological," or as a form of objectification to which persons should not be made subject; nature is a "what," person a "who" (or, with Spaemann's subtitle: a "someone" as opposed to "something"). Likewise, relationality is made a fundamental feature of personhood, as opposed to the substantiality of "nature," which is identified with Boethius's definition. Much of this approach suffers...

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