Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Person Means Relation
    Person Means Relation
    Person Means Relation
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    Person Means Relation

    By David Walsh

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In Person Means Relation, David Walsh offers a moving reflection on personhood, beginning from the connection between person and relation established in the Trinitarian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Although Thomas did not apply this insight to persons more generally, Walsh argues, there is enough to suggest the path he might have taken. To know persons, we can now see, is to know what is going on within them. This understanding is largely the fruit of a later philosophical revolution, a fruit toward which Thomas may have pointed, and which he might well have welcomed.
     
    The University of Dallas Aquinas Lecture for 2023, Person Means Relation is published here with a response by Matthew Walz and a reply by David Walsh.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSt. Augustines Press
    Release dateSep 30, 2024
    ISBN9781587316746
    Person Means Relation
    Author

    David Walsh

    David Walsh is chief sportswriter with The Sunday Times. A four-time Irish Sportswriter of the Year and four-time UK Sportswriter of the Year, he was also named the 2012 British Journalist of the year. Coauthor of L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong and author of From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France, he is married with seven children and lives in Suffolk, England.

    Read more from David Walsh

    Related to Person Means Relation

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Change

      Oct 28, 2019

      Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both? One aspect of the parall

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      I Was Made of Language

      Oct 17, 2024

      I Was Made of Language
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      TWO REVIEWS AND A SPECTRAL INTERLUDE Heredities, Flood Song, and Incantations APR Books

      Sep 1, 2019

      Would we trust other ghosts? —Dawn Lundy Martin I was so excited to hear that J. Michael Martinez and Sherwin Bitsui had poetry collections coming out in 2018. Martinez’s Museum of the Americas was selected as a winner in the 2017 National Poetry Ser

      25 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wake Up To Reality!

      Oct 28, 2021

      Wake Up To Reality!
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Body Language

      Feb 15, 2021

      Early in the autumn, we issued a rare call for pitches that didn’t lead with a theme, giving our communities and contributors a chance to have a say in shaping the next issue in a time of such trenchant irresolution. In response, we heard meditations

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Scaffolding of Rhetoric

      May 30, 2023

      The Scaffolding of Rhetoric
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Our Library

      Jun 6, 2022

      The concept of superstition has been with us for millennia, and yet today it has no agreed-upon meaning. We tend to know it when we see it – as in the examples above. If it carries a single enduring connotation, it is one of disapproval. From almost

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Humans Are Wired for Goodness

      Aug 22, 2019

      Nicholas Christakis and I are on the same page: We would definitely sacrifice our lives to save a billion strangers, perhaps even several hundred million, plucked at random from Earth’s population. But, for sure, not a thousand strangers, or a millio

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett

      May 1, 2024

      Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Can Literature Make Us Better People?

      Nov 7, 2017

      If we take seriously the claims of goodness that works of literature make—claims that needn’t divert from ugliness, and indeed often illuminate systems of injustice—then our time spent in fictional spaces is hardly wasted. The post Can Literature Ma

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In Defense of Third Person

      Oct 18, 2017

      I believe third-person narration is the greatest artistic tool humans have devised to tell the story of what it means to be human. The post In Defense of Third Person appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Around The Web

      Nov 7, 2020

      The categories of Image, Word, Orientation and Action constitute the main divisions of the Warburg Institute Library and encapsulate its aim: to study the tenacity of symbols and images in European art and architecture (Image, 1st floor); the persist

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Write?

      Oct 31, 2019

      Where does all this leave us? There can be no conclusion except that writing, aside from speaking, is the most human activity. The post Why Write? appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Writing Bound to Bodies: Cristina Rivera Garza in Conversation with Samantha Hunt

      Oct 30, 2017

      I see myself as someone creating spaces in language in which rubble may speak for itself, bringing its pastness with it. In a country in which bodies are made to forcefully disappear, a skeleton is a last remnant of the material life—and a material t

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Kill Your Idols: On the Violence of Experimental Literature

      Oct 23, 2019

      If innovation is in itself a destructive gesture, can that generative violence be placed in service of activism and advocacy through language? The post Kill Your Idols: On the Violence of Experimental Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Freud the Essayist

      Jun 1, 2023

      Freud the Essayist
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      To The Limits

      Sep 17, 2021

      To The Limits
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Charmed Life of Frank Wilczek

      Mar 17, 2021

      Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, is both a way of thinking about the abundance that characterizes our exterior and interior worlds, and a kind of alternative to traditional religion, a way of being “born aga

      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Look Who’s Talking

      Nov 29, 2024

      Look Who’s Talking
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Drifting Toward Wonder: The Millions Interviews Lia Purpura

      Apr 11, 2019

      The associative impulse confirms the deep systems holding us together even if we’re bent on ignoring or destroying those tethers. The post Drifting Toward Wonder: The Millions Interviews Lia Purpura appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Person Means Relation

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Person Means Relation - David Walsh

      NOTE

      This volume is the fruit of the forty-first annual Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas, hosted by the Department of Philosophy and delivered by Prof. David Walsh on January 26, 2023. We thank Dr. Walsh once more for the opportunity to think along with him, in the spirit of St. Thomas. We thank as well our colleague Matthew Walz for his insightful contribution to this conversation, here published along with the lecture and followed by a response by Dr. Walsh.

      Thanks are due also to our colleague Lance Simmons, for copy-editing the manuscripts; our staff colleague Sarah Oates, for her beautiful new cover design for the series; and Benjamin Fingerhut of St. Augustine’s Press, for his hard work and friendly professionalism.

      Together with Dr. Walsh, we dedicate this volume to distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy William A. Frank, whose work on personalism and Catholic social thought brought Dr. Walsh to our campus; to Bill’s wife, Therese; and to the late Bruce Fingerhut, founder of St. Augustine’s Press, who first agreed to publish these lectures.

      Faculty of the Department of Philosophy, University of Dallas

      Memorial of St. Anselm

      April 21, 2024

      PERSON MEANS RELATION

      ST. THOMAS AQUINAS LECTURE UNIVERSITY OF DALLAS, JANUARY 26, 2023

      DAVID WALSH

      When we think about persons we often seem to have started on the wrong foot. In a world of things it is easy to overlook what it means to be a person. But then we have made a monstrous mistake. We must not treat persons as things for they are entirely different. The problem is that our language is dominated by things that have existence, while persons seem to emerge from beyond existence. They carry their existence within them as what it means to be a person. That is why they are sacrosanct. A zone of inviolability surrounds them, even if we cannot explain whence it derives. They have transcended who they are before they have even arrived. That is why they must not be abused or killed as if it means nothing. We too are touched by the inwardness that seems to pervade their reality. They have an inside we intuit immediately. Yet we have no word for that non-present presence. The best we have been able to say is that they hold a mask, prósōpon, a face before us as the way they conceal what is not and perhaps cannot be revealed. It is from this Greek term prósōpon that we get the name person and from the Latin personare the parallel notion of a mask that is sounded through. In neither case do we have a technical term, and that shortcoming has marked the whole tradition up to modern times. It is arguable that it was only the necessity of distinguishing between the three persons of the Trinity, as well as the two natures in the person of Christ, that compelled Christian theologians to hammer out some vague sense of what it means to be a person. This is despite the ubiquity of persons as the most evident aspect of what each of us is and of the world of our interactions with one another.

      We never get away from persons, who are so close to us that we scarcely possess a language to navigate the reality of persons. How could we forget what we have always already forgotten? In what follows I will sketch an attempt to find a more adequate way of speaking that saves us from defaulting to the language of things. We begin with St. Thomas, whose own struggle with the question has given us the title of our talk, without necessarily fully explaining what is involved. A wider application of his striking insight would have to await a language of inwardness that was not readily available to him. To develop it, relation would, second, have to be understood as a holding of the other inwardly. This is made possible by the modern idea of self-determination as, third, the distinctive mark of what it means to be a person. Holding existence in our own hands we become capable of giving ourselves to others and receiving others within us. Meeting outside of the whole, each is, in the formulation of Immanuel Kant, a whole or an end-in-himself-or-herself. Finally we glimpse self-transcendence as mutuality, the possibility of communication between persons that Thomas had identified as relation. A very different notion of the person as transcendence begins to suggest why his reflection centered on the relation between the persons of the Trinity. What it means to be a person is so far above our ordinary mode of discourse that it begins, not surprisingly, with an admission of our philosophical

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1