ABSTRACT
Here, the strength of the conceptual connection that Wiggins divines between human being and person is tested. It is suggested that a genealogical analysis of our notion of ‘a person’ undermines his ‘semantic argument’ (described in Chapter 4). A genealogical sketch of that concept is offered (based on Marcel Mauss’s essay ‘A Category of the Human Mind’) and it is shown how our everyday use of the term relies on distinct and sometimes conflicting significations and cannot thus give us insight into an unchangeable pre-theoretical structure.
