| Sumario: | The writer discusses conceptions of persons in liberal theory. He argues that the liberal theory depends on two metaphysical conceptions of the person: one that is developed in the literature as property dualism and the other is a form of what is called practice dualism. He states that these conceptions are parts of a set containing various accounts of the person that each can influence political theory in critical ways. He discusses the alternative accounts elaborated by what he refers to as ontological dualism and the versions of the nondual self found in work by John Searle and Daniel Dennett. He notes that all of these conceptions are tied to basic assumptions on language and social experience, which suggests both the need to retrieve and define the self in political theory and the difficulty of doing this without an exploration of metaphysics. In addition, he discusses Rawls's conception of the person, and he reaches the speculative conclusion that a narrative account of the self might be more useful in political theory than formal conceptions of the person.
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