ML: Why persons have dignity? The personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Karol Wojtyla and John F. Crosbe. WF-FI-212-WMAN-MA22

The lecture is devoted to the issue of understanding the dignity of the human person in contemporary personalism. We will answer questions: what are essential features of philosophical conception of the human person? What exactly does the dignity of a person mean? Can it represent the basis for creating multicultural communities?

We will draw on the work of contemporary personalists. Their proposal represent a coherent ethical model in which the ontological dimension is combined with the phenomenological one: the classical (Aristotelian-Tomistic) understanding of the human person found its original complement in a personalistic one.

In our classes we will study important categories of the human existence. The starting point are data and experience from moral life. We will reconstruct an objectivistic analysis of human nature, present in Aristotelian and Tomistic philosophy, and the necessity of its more subjectivistic conception in the light of phenomenology. Very important aspect of the selfhood of the human person is incommunicability. Thanks to it, every person exists as an irreplaceable subject and belongs incommunicably to themselves. Thanks to incommunicability the person possesses two fundamental values: dignity, and personal charm. This issue seems to be quite crucial because of excessive anthropocentrism in the culture of the 21st century.

An important and complementing aspect of forming communities, and, parallelly, the deepest truth about the person, is their relation towards the Absolute.

We will see, that personalistic understanding of the human person constitutes a response to modern manifestations of individualism and collectivism could be the basis for creating deeper forms of community. Therefore personalism inscribes well in a modern philosophical debate on understanding the human nature and person.