A Genealogy of Personhood
Fictions of Law, Life, and Artificial Intelligence
A Genealogy of Personhood
Fictions of Law, Life, and Artificial Intelligence
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Description
Are the boundaries of human life fixed or open to interpretation and reinvention, and is personhood just a fictional construct? The recent attributing of human dignity to rivers, robots, and now AI, has challenged how we think about the frame of the human. But is this a new phenomenon?
This book examines the shifting boundary between human and non-human dignities, rights and freedoms. From Roman law to today's debates surrounding animals, forests, and AI, the book reveals that the boundary between persons and things - between what is human and what is not - has never been fixed, but is an open and contested frame determined by legal, theological, and biopolitical practices.
The book presents a cartography of personhood in Western culture - from Roman jurists and theatre to theological ideas - followed by a consideration of how these same ideas have extended or challenged human definitions. Within this two-part structure, the six chapters map a deep relationality between the politics of humanization and dehumanization, between fictions that both protect and exclude, subjectify and subject; historical layers that have provided the groundwork for modern juridical and biopolitical conceptions of personhood, granted with rights, agency and freedoms.
Combining a historian's scope with the keen critical eye of a philosopher, Rodríguez-Cárdenas reveals how personhood works in two ways: it can be both forged by cultural narratives as well as denied. Rather than a timeless essence, personhood is a historical and contested formation, produced through shifting fictions of inclusion and exclusion.
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Table of Contents
Part One: The Cartography of Personhood
1. A Mosaic of Personhood
2. Theatre, Grammar, Theology, Reason
3. From Politics to Biology
Part Two: Personhood of Non-human Entities
4. Thresholds
5. Simulacra and Erasures
6. Apertures, Frames, Voices
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | Mar 18 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350650749 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Political Theologies |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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