Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood * By SIMON EVNINE

Abstract

Philosophers concerned with the question ‘what is a person?’ have often appealed to the claim that persons are essentially rational beings. Those who make this appeal, though, tend to develop it by spelling out the key notion of rationality in terms of practical rationality: to be a person, one must be able to deliberate, choose a course of action and intentionally act according to one's chosen course. In this book, Simon Evnine argues that epistemic rationality is essential to being a person: personhood requires that one must possess certain logical concepts and live up to certain epistemic norms. This is a novel suggestion – one that I am sure many theorizers about personhood would agree with, but which has not been worked out in this level of detail before. The book promises, then, to be a valuable addition to the literature on personhood, and also promises to be an interesting read – weaving a set of interesting connections between our notion of a person and logical and epistemic notions and norms. In fact, though, the book does not live up to its promise, for reasons I will elaborate later in this review.