ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes defined a person as someone “whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.”1 His definition distinguishes sharply between the person and the person’s words or actions. Of course the words or actions can be regarded as the person’s own. That would reflect our natural understanding of what a person is: a human being saying and doing certain things. But Hobbes stretches the natural understanding beyond its ordinary limits. The way he sees the matter, words and actions need not at all belong to the person saying and doing them. They can represent the words and actions of someone else. Indeed, they need not come from any human being; they can be attributed to things. Even if the attribution is grounded in a fiction, the person does not lose its reality. From Hobbes’point of view, a person is like an actor appearing on a stage in one of infinitely many forms of play.2 The person is one thing, the role is quite another. The actor wears a mask. What lies behind the mask may never be revealed without undoing the very nature of the person.
