ABSTRACT
Person can mirror a natural category, a social category, a theological category, or be defined specifically for law’s purposes as a ‘right-and-duty bearing entity’. The intense anxieties that surround the notion of corporate personality need to be read against this theological background. The case of the Trinitarian person can stand as a metonym for the definitive unknowability of categories in general, and the consequent necessity of stipulation. In early modernity, philosophers established the self/person divide as a reflection of philosophical individualism and subjectivism on the one hand, and the law and politics of personhood on the other. From the first-person perspective, what is created moment-to-moment is spontaneous sense-making, from which a third-person impersonal landscape is imagined or projected. Integrationism is anthropocentric, but it offers no fixed opinions about personhood in relation to animals or, indeed, the members of the Trinity. Ideological critiques of humanism or personhood point to the multiple exclusions, including genocide, that have been enacted under these categories.
