Pretty fascinating. This sounds like other variations of philosophy aimed at social advance and societal well-being. There are and have been many ways of looking at this. They have certain common core features. To me, this shows us that philosophy, at bottom, has always been about a love of knowledge and the betterment of human conditions. We may, at times, have been on a different page but browsing through the same book. Contingency changes, while providence smiles on purpose and determination. Yeah. I have said that last part before.

In looking at the ethnophilosophical work of Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye, codifying the concept of Akan personhood, as Ajume Wingo has done in the SEP, both Wiredu and Gyekye unify behind the principle of moral worth based on care-taking action toward others. Where Wiredu sees value, Gyekye sees virtue. Both require a healthy dose of decolonization to differentiate traditional culture.

The primary anthropological observation is the burial practice and mourning for infant mortality. Akan parents are stoic, have little ceremony, and encourage cheerfulness, having just lost an infant. Funerals are proportionate to personhood status, which explains this practice. If there is a difference in opinion in why this happens, it happens. Ethnophilosophy needs to explain and cohere to the Akan view of personhood, but there are different views within the tradition.

Akan attitudes toward death complement the living relationships that witness personhood and lessen those who flaunt responsibility for family, neighbors, and community. This attitude calls out introversion, individualism, and, importantly, dissent. Open discussion is limited while community works are encouraged. Significantly Akan cultures did not extend the same rights of personhood to neighboring peoples. Akan leaders have only recently taken ownership of their role in promoting and profiteering from slavery.

Understanding Africa is code for understanding the future. Covid and climate change present challenges to poverty reduction in Africa, but the trends pre-Covid were positive. The Akan are an interesting if exceptional case to less fortunate African sub-cultures. Their relative prosperity brings Akan thought to bear on the postcolonial public work and identity problems for all Africans.

Ajume Wingo is an excellent bridge into the minds of postcolonial Africa and pan-African thought, for that matter. Personhood is muddled in all cultures, particularly in America and Western tradition, but no one culture can claim to have gotten this right. We see this in the streets, in our discourse, and in art. Akan ideas already shade perceptions of African culture and solidarity. It is helpful to consider these cultures and philosophies as American personhood is assaulted with technological models of meaning and manipulated with polarizing wealth and inequity. Africans are experiencing similar pressures while naming their own minds in the aftermath of colonialism.

Interlocutor Smith has provided the forum with a competent account of some tenets of Akan philosophy. Because he seems to distinguish between Akan and American personhood, however, as well as degrees of "personhood status" (cf. second paragraph), I would like to submit a request that an account of the general concept of personhood be provided as well. This would allow the present interlocutor, at any rate, an unambiguous common basis for discussion of this important theme.

O.K. So Personhood involves self determination. Take the example of a spider which spins a web in a homeowner's garden, and sits in the middle of it. It's this spider's web and not another's. Seeing this, the homeowner avoids disturbing the web and does not destroy it, and therefore treats the spider as though it were a person. If the homeowner however says it is a person, however, would she/he be correct?

Plenty to choose from. Corporations, Robots, Pets, talking dolphins, could all by your account exhibit genuine indications of Personhood, and could therefore be not inaccurately characterized as persons, the necessary condition for which, as you put it, is the occupation of space; while independent agency alone would not be sufficient.

That doesn't seem to narrow it down too much. All we know by your account is what a person isn't: a spider. The chair I'm seated in, for example, meets your criterion, and therefore might be a person. But if it were, I wouldn't want to sit on it. My own view is that the concept, or concepts in general, of personhood, is/are characterized by self determination because the latter derives from two roots: the right of self determination and the independent agency, or willful internal self management, of that which self-determines. The spider belongs with the group under the first heading. Although it spins its own web, it's not free not to spin a web. Corporations also belong here (though in a purely legalistic sense), along with household pets, California's giant sequoias, and protected wilderness areas in general. Robotic devices however could not enjoy any protection by such rights, but could, in stages of highly advanced development, conceivably belong to the group under the second heading.

The point here, I think, is what makes a human being a person, rather than just a "featherless biped" (apteron duopodikon-- Aristotle's expression). My account does not proceed beyond the two roots of self determination: the right to it and the independent self management for it. Your account apparently goes much farther. My hope is that in your magnanimous proliferousness you can share it with the forum.

Daniel,

That was Plato, not Aristotle, who used dipoun apteron. Aristotle was closer to the point describing people as political animals. You don't need a complicated system of forms to tell you what a person is, which was Diogenes' point.

I thought, and still do, that you were asking the show hosts to push Ajume or, as an intro to the program, Josh or Ray to call out Western personhood. No need to proliferate magnanimity. I can respond to your ideas and offer my own. Still, I would point to the sources I listed before for even better focus.

I never said anything that would extend personhood to a chair or a dolphin. Dolphins don't have language but communicate well enough all the same. But dolphins are more likely persons than spiders, which might help express that personhood is a spectrum and not a toggle. The normative view in Western culture does not use this gradient theory, however. You are either a slave or free, gentry or commoner, person or not, as determined by culture.

Historically the concept of self is new to humans. We know this from several points brought out by Kurt Danzinger in his essay I referenced above. The historical concepts of personhood are still around if hidden under the veneer of self and modern personhood.

Personhood in the United States and most Western cultures is a mess, as you can see on the National mall this past weekend and in the legal rulings in Texas regarding the legal right for women to have an abortion. This ties into the integration of perspective and experience of psychological time in a backward, present, and forward sense affording personhood to human beings in historical, current, or potential states.

A fetus has no agency, neither does a human being lying in a coma (or in a locked-in state for that matter) or a mentally compromised individual. Yet, the normative conception is to extend personhood to these cases or set stringent lines of personhood in the issue of abortion. So that is why I would deny agency a normative role in personhood. Not that there is any reason it doesn't in a forward or backward-looking state. I would point out that agency might not exist either but what is existence between interlocutors?

Besides the spectrum of personhood, time concerns, and agency, the most straightforward modern normative criterion of personhood is genetic makeup. This brings us back to the issue of animals, aliens, or artificial intelligence – all of whom have been issued normative personhood in fictive if not historical cases. It seems normal to assign E.T. personhood despite being from another world. An orangutan named Sandra was granted nonhuman personhood in Argentina and now lives in Florida. In the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, HAL is one of many artificial intelligences in fiction conceived as human. These fictive and rare cases aside, the "normal" sense of personhood in Western culture extends only to human beings. But organoids have human genes, and they aren't persons, so there are other criteria.

Cognition is generally another Western marker using consciousness, ability to reason, capacity to communicate, and self-awareness. But all that comes with variable measures of personhood.

Social status is also a good criterion, but that allows slavery and dehumanization of humans who are outsiders, socially demeaned, or foreign.

Yet another criterion is one of sentience, as put forward by Peter Singer. This would include those creatures based on their ability to experience pleasure or pain.

That all these ideas persist in Western culture indicates the muddle of personhood. To this muddle, I drew the comparison with the clear Akan sense of personhood.

When you ask a person what they are, in general, they give an occupation. In most societies, this also sets the gradient of personhood for that individual. Yes, it seems purely legalistic to extend personhood to corporations, but many people assign genuine value to their jobs and companies. Some subsume their company's values, execute actions, and explain their responsibilities to others as doing their job.

Whatever your criteria or view on personhood, from that point comes ethics. What the Akan philosophers are working out could inform our own problems with personhood. That, besides global warming, might be the biggest problem of all. Our philosophical difference over personhood is the fulcrum weighing our social divide regardless of whether what one says qualifies as a person is correct or not.

And sometimes the same. As Wiredu points out ("Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion", African Studies Quarterly; Vol. 1, Issue 4, 1998; p.22, top of page), even though no study of logic as a formal discipline obtains in Ghana historically, many intellectuals in the West African tradition have found principles such as that of non-contradiction and the exclusion of any middle term between true and false indispensable for explication of respective indigenous reasoning.

Whew. I have been away, for reasons of bad luck and fate. Yes, I count those as discernably different. I have respect for the ancient. Insofar as the subject of akan philosophy has generated the preceding spirited dialogue, i really must dig into it. Thanks, guys!

My early remarks on akan were sans research. Some searching revealed they are a matrilineal culture. This likely plays a role in their way of looking at things including personhood and sense-of-self. I have not adduced whether they are/were more or less warlike that other tribal cultures. A guess might be that it could depend on a totality of circumstances, including the aggressiveness of their neighbors. Hormones are harbingers of behaviour, but people generally do what they must to survive and prosper. Contrary to early contentions regarding the human female, we know that women think clearly enough and are well-able to plan for circumstances; act upon contingencies; and "pivot" when necessary. Some of us may remember the late Julian Jaynes and his notions of the bicameral mind: the idea that early man could not decide what to do. We may also wonder if early women were so afflicted...

Poor choice of word, maybe. I used afflicted in the final sentence above. Perhaps endowed would have been better? It carries a more positively weighted connotation, so that whatever Jaynes' intention, meaning or understanding, bicameral people ( if that is what they were) were doing the best they could with what they had and knew.