Esta dissertação faz uma reflexão sobre a noção de pessoa dos índios Waimiri-Atroari, povo caribe-guianense, com um foco no ritual de iniciação masculina. Para tanto, abordo o ritual como um momento de aquecimento das trocas simbólicas deste grupo, em que o neófito encorpora diversas perspectivas ou pessoas em diversas escalas. A análise relaciona, portanto, as performances dos cantos que evocam animais, plantas, humanos e não humanos com algumas qualidades e hábitos destes seres evocados. O tema da troca aparece ainda em uma consideração sobre o casamento e as narrativas míticas. / This dissertation presents a reflection about the concept of personhood for the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous, a Caribbean-Guianean people, focusing on the male initiation ritual. In this sense, the ritual is approached as warming stage of the symbolic exchange within the group, a moment in which the neophyte embodies several perspectives or persons in several scales. The analysis relates, thus, the chant performances - which evoke animals, plants, human and non-humans to determined qualities and behavior of the evoked beings. The exchange theme also arises in a consideration on the marriage and the mythic narratives.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / A political arrangement is an arrangement for persons. Political arrangements are assessed in terms of the extent to which they manage the affairs of persons, which includes protecting their interests and entitlements. Political arrangements which are unable to protect the interests of its citizens, or a group of citizens, are deemed unacceptable, and where appropriate, alternative arrangements which do protect the interests and entitlements of its citizens are sought. In this thesis I argue that the political arrangement of John Rawls is unable to protect the interests and entitlements of the severely cognitively disabled who are regarded as full citizens by advanced political arrangements in the world today. I argue that it is the contract nature and conception of the person in Rawls’s system which excludes the severely cognitively disabled. This exclusion goes against our widely-held intuitions about the rights and entitlements of the severely cognitively disabled. I look to the Person Life View of Marya Schechtman, a conception of the person that includes the severely cognitively disabled, to see if a conception of the person that includes the severely cognitively disabled is able to solve the gap in Rawls’s system. I argue that it is not able to do so. I then propose a new way of approaching questions of personhood and appeal to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as the basis, arguing that membership of a type of organism typically considered a person is enough to be a complete member of that type and therefore a person.

abstract: The 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade was a significant event in the story of fetal personhood—the story of whether embryos and fetuses are legal persons. Roe legalized abortion care in the United States (US). However, the story of fetal personhood began long before the 1970s. People have been talking about embryos, fetuses, and their status in science, the law, and society for centuries. I studied the history of fetal personhood in the United States, tracing its origins from Ancient Rome and Medieval England to its first appearance in a US courtroom in 1884 and then to the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973. But this isn’t a history of events—of names and dates and typical details. This is a history of words. In the twenty-first century, words used to discuss embryos and fetuses are split. Some people use humanizing language like “unborn children” and “human life.” Others use technical words like “embryos” and “fetuses.” I studied what words people used historically. I charted how words moved from science to the public to the law, and how they impacted court rulings on fetal personhood. The use of certain words nudged courts to grant additional rights to embryos and fetuses. In the 1960s, writers began describing the science of development, using words like “unborn child” and humanizing descriptions to make embryos and fetuses seem like people already born. That helped build an idea of embryos and fetuses as having “life” before birth. When people began asking courts to legalize abortion care in the 1970s, attorneys on the opposite side argued that embryos and fetuses were “human life,” and that that “life” began at conception. In those cases, “life” was biologically defined as when sperm fertilized egg, but it was on that biological definition “life” that judges improperly rested their legal rulings that embryos and fetuses were “potential human life” states had a duty to protect. It wasn’t legal personhood, but it was a legal status that let states pass laws restricting abortion care and punishing pregnant people for their behavior, trends that threaten people’s lives and autonomy in the twenty-first century. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Biology 2020

This thesis is a contribution to a broader interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which emotional well-being manifests in communal contexts. Using the artistic practice of Mbusa-making among the Bemba of Zambia as a case study, it understands emotional well-being as a relational practice and a dynamic process, not as an attained goal, an affective state, or a static situation. The data used for the thesis are drawn from previous research on the art of Mbusa, specifically that of Audrey Richards in the 1930s and of Bennetta Jules-Rosette in the 1970s, with supplementary distance interviews conducted by the author of this thesis, throughout 2020 and 2021. The thesis seeks to map out the experience of well-being with the utilization of conceptual tools given mainly by existential-phenomenological anthropology. Its main objective is to revisit some pioneer ethnographic studies, by focusing on Mbusa's underestimated link to emotional well-being, enriching them with contemporary theories on imagination,agency, and personhood. The thesis discusses the mainstream discourse on well-being as sit is associated with hapiness, physical health, and the social indicators for the quality of life among poor and wealthy nations. Thus, it places the practice of Mbusa amid that widespread approach, questioning it. The case of this Bemba practice in Zambia is used to illustrate the point that well-being is the universal, ever-present act of coping with adversity and to demonstrate its artistic and imaginative qualities that help people be in the world.

We live in a time marked by ecological precarity and crisis. Critical scholars of the Anthropocene have identified extractivism and its associated ideology of human exceptionalism as driving forces behind these crises. This thesis joins a call to develop naturalcultural theory – ways of conceptualizing the more-than-human world and our place in it as humans that do not rely on longstanding distinctions between “Nature” and “Culture.” Moreover, scholars and activists have clearly outlined the urgent need for us to change the way we live with nonhumans. As a step towards such new ways of living with nonhumans, in this project I study how foragers foster multispecies ethics through their encounters with nonhumans, using multispecies ethnography as my primary methodology. In this thesis, I develop a theoretical framework through which to understand forager-plant interactions, informed by my experiences in the field interviewing and observing foragers as they harvest plants and directly studying the plants that my participants frequently interacted with. I tentatively propose a distinction between extractive and non-extractive approaches to foraging. Overall, I suggest viewing plants and humans as living-persons who are tangled in a field of socioecological relations to one another. Through partial and intermittent encounters, they become contaminated and adopt new habits that affect their future interactions with other living-persons. This has important implications for how we conceive of ethics as only incorporating nonhumans as objects of ethical consideration rather than ethical subjects in their own right.

The issues raised in this thesis concern the adverse effects of EU's wildlife trade regulations, mainly the unequal treatment of captive and wild-born endangered animals. The nature of these regulations is analyzed from an animal law perspective. The purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the regulations are anthropocentric and, if so, what issues arise from it. Previous research has studied the legal personhood of animals in relation to animal welfare. This thesis continues that discussion by examining legal animal rights as a potential solution to the issues of wildlife trade. The analysis is pragmatic and employs a non-formalistic view of law. Consequentially, it uses a doctrinal and legal philosophical approach, meaning that sources outside of law are integral to the discussion. The results of the analysis show that EU’s wildlife trade regulations are anthropocentric and that this has led to severe issues regarding the welfare of endangered animals. In addition, the practical enforcement of the regulations has proven defective. Legal rights for animals seem to provide a viable solution to these issues, yet their practical implementation is complicated. The reasons for this are primarily financial and opinion-based. Therefore, a step-by-step approach, starting with limited fundamental rights and resulting in full legal personhood for animals, is recommended for this approach to be successful.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ethical considerations of the human embryo have involved heated dispute and seem always to result in the same interminable debate. A history of this debate, however, shows a shift in the language used to distinguish between degrees of moral status – while the debate once focused on the presence or absence of “human life,” now it is more likely to hear whether the qualifications for “personhood” have been met. In other words, any member of the human species may deserve some level of respect, but only the “persons” deserve full moral respect. This leaves open the possibility for a human being who is not actually a person – a “nonperson human being.” As an answer to the question of exactly what kind of respect to give the human embryo, Aristotelian moral philosophy offers a unique perspective, one which is distinctive from the familiar debate. Aristotle’s concept of ergon, or function, is a key to understanding what is essential in any human being, because it reveals the importance of potentiality to our nature as rational beings. A philosophical view of function, combined with the data of modern embryology, makes the case that our proper function is the vital part of who we are as human beings, and that a disruption of human function constitutes a true harm. This thesis contrasts Aristotelian proper human function with the modern understanding of a “nonperson human being,” especially as articulated within the ethical theory of Peter Singer. This understanding of function, revealing the essence of human potential and linked with human development, offers a sort of “common-sense morality” response to modern views on personhood.

John Dewey was America's foremost authority on many of the critical issues in the twentieth century. Dewey dedicated his professional career as an expert on the major branches of philosophy. A neglected aspect of Dewey's philosophy is his writings on historiography, the philosophy of history, and his influence on American historians. Dewey affected several generations of historians from the Progressive historians to the practical realists of today. This study evaluates Dewey's pragmatism as a legitimate strain in American historiography. James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard claimed Dewey as an influence. Later historians such as Richard Hofstadter and Joyce Appleby insist his methods make for more responsible-minded historians. There is enough material from American historians to assert that Dewey and Deweyan pragmatism influenced and still impacts historians into the twenty-first century.

This thesis examines how members of a Muslim community (made up of migrants and their descendants from various parts of North Africa, West Africa, Turkey, and elsewhere) in a small town in France seek to become moral persons through Islam. I argue that this quest for moral recognition is informed simultaneously by Islamic and French Republican values, which my French Muslim interlocutors usually conceive of as being consistent with one another. I contrast this analysis with other scholarly approaches to Islam in France that have generally explored the way non-Muslims perceive Islam to be at odds with Frenchness, how Muslims are marginalized and kept from becoming full citizens, and how certain public figures challenge and resist that oppression through explicit forms of resistance. I argue that these accounts, by focusing on Muslims seeking political recognition (from the state) in the face of oppression, have failed to account for the life projects of French Muslims, like my interlocutors, who emphasize moral over political considerations. In contrast to previous approaches, I follow my interlocutors' lead in analyzing the ways in which they seek after moral personhood and recognition as moral persons in their everyday discourse and practice. Thus, I show how an understanding of the moral projects of French Muslims is key to moving beyond a focus on suffering, oppression, and resistance in scholarship examining the experiences of migrants in France.

Background: The Public Health Agency of Canada published a strategic document recognising the elements associated with person-centred dementia care, including interactions with stakeholders and research mandates. One essential element identified was advanced therapies, containing non-pharmacological interventions, such as creative arts-based interventions. Objective: This thesis investigates the impact of creative arts-based interventions on individuals with dementia, living in residential care through a scoping review (ScR) and a mixed-methods systematic review (MMSR). Methods: The ScR surveyed the current literature base to identify which creative arts-based interventions improved the personhood, quality of life and well-being of persons with dementia (PwD); five studies were included. The MMSR explored the impact of dance interventions on the symptoms of dementia on persons with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, as dance was unrepresented in the ScR; three studies were included. Both reviews were narratively synthesized due to the heterogeneity in the results. Results: Each included study spoke of the impact the creative arts had on the PwD and which element(s) of their health improved. Results also showed that the creative arts were beneficial for the personhood of the PwD (ScR) and for decreasing symptoms while promoting the person (MMSR). Conclusion: We must continue to look past the condition and recognize that creativity, psychosocial needs, and creative arts are all interconnected in promoting the personhood of PwD. Creative arts-based interventions can be designed to promote the individual creativity of the person and showcase their intact abilities.