Abstract

Persons are those individuals who have or have a natural potential for the capacities of subjective awareness, intrinsic intentionality and cognition, and intentional action. This chapter considers persons primarily through their capacity for intentional action, and more specifically still through the freedom of will or choice that people commonly suppose mature, intact human persons to manifest. The main argument of the chapter is that the schematic philosophical “theory” of minded human persons that best accounts for relevant natural‐historical, organismic‐developmental, neurophysiological, and introspective evidence has it that people are wholly physically composed. The chapter shows how causally conditioned and physically composed entities may nonetheless be fundamental, nonderivative causes. A full articulation of emergence in terms of the nonbasic but fundamental requires people to take a stand on the ontological categories of individual (substance) and property. The chapter discusses substratum‐attribute theory, and applies the theory to the thesis that human persons are composite, emergent individuals.