• John Gray,  Personhood,  Roger Scruton,  Why a Person is a Person

    Why a Person is a Person

    Roger Scruton once wrote: “The most important task for philosophy in the modern world is to resurrect the human person, to rescue it from trivializing science, and to replace the sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not.”1 If, as most western educated children are baptized into believing, the human species arose through natural evolutionary processes, the concept of human, as anything more that demarcation of species type, is very difficult to maintain. Scruton points to an important modern dilemma. Either our intuition is correct—we are different than the beasts—or our observation is correct – we are the result of a…