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    What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
    What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
    What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
    Ebook511 pages13 hours

    What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

    By Christian Smith

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    About this ebook

    What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist’s quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society.

    Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity.

    Innovative, critical, and constructive, What Is a Person? offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226765938
    What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

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