Another excellent post by my friend and colleague Gaelan Gilbert, this time on persons and post-humans.

“That tension manifests itself in regard to the issue of personhood. For while the ontological question of personhood still and will forever persist among those who take seriously the factors which exceed mere economics, the functional definition of personhood in legal procedure has largely become a settled matter. But are personhood and human-ness two different things? In some ways, yes. Which is the larger category? Interestingly, both historical Christian theology and post-humanism would privilege the category of personhood as prior, insofar as, for the former, the Trinitarian Persons – especially the Second, manifest and embodied as Christ – are originarily exemplary, while for the latter (post-humanists), personhood is extended – sometimes casually, sometimes cautiously – to things: plants, animals, machines, inanimate objects, etc. Only primitive humanists (ha!) would privilege the human.”