ABSTRACT
Persons are for Rom Harré one of the basic constituents of the social universe as only persons can show intentionality and act in a non-causal way. Persons are distinguished from non-persons by personhood. At the level of individual beings, this personhood is expressed in a personality, that which distinguishes one person from another. Many of his publications have been dealing with issues related to personhood and personality. For Harré (1998: 15) persons have to be regarded as the basic entities for a science of psychology. Over time three inter-related clusters of attention have emerged in Harré’s work: (i) the problem of personal identity and concepts such as self, persona and personality; (ii) the capability of persons to both act and to give accounts of their actions; and (iii) the development of personality over time as expressed in biographies.
