The Nature of Human Persons

Jason T. Eberl is the Hubert Maeder Chair in health care ethics, professor of health care ethics and philosophy, and director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. He is the author of a number of books, including Contemporary Controversies in Catholic Bioethics.

Foreword by Christopher Kaczor Preface Acknowledgments 1. What Am I? Questions of Human Nature and Identity 2. This is Us: Hylomorphic View of Human Nature 3. I Think, Therefore...: Varieties of Dualism 4. Thou Art Dust: Varieties of Materialism 5. Starting Out: The Beginning of Human Persons 6. End of Line: The Death of Human Persons 7. Is This All that I Am? Post-Mortem Persons 8. Who is My Sister or Brother? Treating Persons Ethically List of Aquinas's Works and Abbreviations Bibliography Index

"Readers interested in a sophisticated application of Thomistic thought to contemporary ethics will find this an important book, especially because Eberl avoids the common pitfall of allowing his text to become bogged down in debates over the proper interpretation of Aquinas." -Choice "There are innumerable books in bioethics, but none that take up issues of human anthropology in anything like the depth found in Jason T. Eberl's The Nature of Human Persons." -Christopher Kaczor, author of Abortion Rights: For and Against "Well-written and carefully argued, with some passages of very insightful Thomistic exegesis, and brings together the fruits of Eberl's long-term research projects in an accessible one-volume work." -Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "Eberl brings Thomas Aquinas into conversation with a number of contemporary English-speaking philosophers and seeks to show that Thomas provides a satisfying via media between substance dualism and reductive materialism."-The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review "The arguments of the text are persuasive, making The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics an especially fine contribution to both the bioethics literature and to metaphysical discussions of the human person."-The Review of Metaphysics "Even those readers less engaged by the details of Thomistic hylomorphism will find much to consider in this extensively documented manuscript."-Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics "A valuable contribution to contemporary debates about the metaphysics of the human person. Eberl defends Thomism clearly and succinctly, whilst engaging in a rigorous and novel way with his philosophical opponents."-The New Bioethics