Abstract
Looking at the way the person is studied and conceptualized in the humanities in general, and in historical-biographical studies in particular, many shortcomings become visible, which in my view prompts a serious meta-theoretical interest in the person. Recent studies in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and post-analytic philosophy have made strong headway in our understanding of the person. To be more specific, I believe that the results from these studies can be incorporated into a holistic and normative theory of the person. Holistic because I argue that the person is best understood as being composed of elements and relations of many orders, the sufficiently large amount of which are interrelated. Normative for two reasons: first, because the theory's validity stems only from a certain perspective. Second, it is normative as in prescriptive, that is, I am arguing that any scholar in the humanities studying the person should take this theory to be delineating the necessary, appropriate and justified presuppositions for the study of a person. I will endeavour to show the concrete usefulness of the theory by exemplifying it, primarily, through the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood. The theory gives us a proper direction, which entails that other several current and fashionable directions are seen as inadequate.
