Person, Identity and History: The Problem of a New Legitimacy of the Old Concepts

The paper analyzes the problem of a new legitimacy of the concepts of person, identity and history. It argues that the idea of person from the phenomenological point of view resides in the image of other human being that is the mental object of “he/she”-representation imaging like “I”-entity in every “You”-perception. In other words, even if someone thinks metaphysically of an indefinite and not fixed human personality, he will concurrently imagine a human being of definite experienced quality. It means that it is impossible to think of a human person without thinking of this person as an experienced human being. Thinking of a person intentionally requires the presence of a perceptible human image not only as medium in the process of perception, but also as object of thought of historically defined human personality.

person, identity, history, phenomenology of body experience