Higher-order persons: an ontological challenge?

Abstract

The concepts of superindividual mind and superindividual person represent a double ontological challenge: in formal ontology, as higher order objects; in regional ontology, as minds and persons. I will discuss Stein’s (1922) phenomenological description of common intentionality and her accounts of individual and superindividual personality and personhood in Social Ontology. Her argumentation is first to be proved within other phenomenological accounts, particulary in comparison with Husserl’s concept of higher order person (Personalität höherer Ordnung), Scheler’s total person (Gesamtperson) and Gallagher and Zahavi’s philosophy of mind (2008). Finally I will try to compare it with Petitt’s concept of group mind, stressing Stein’s distinction between stream of consciosness and stream of experience and the way the latter is founded on the former.

Keywords

• person
• group mind
• collective intentionality
• social ontology
• formal ontology