Individuo, Pessoa, Sujeito de Direitos: Contribuições Renascentistas para uma História dos Conceitos Jurídicos

Abstract

The author attempts at demonstrating how, during the Renaissance, the reconfiguration of the terms “individual”, “person”, and “subject”, as legal artefacts, has made it possible to create a new way of grasping reality and transforming it. She begins by pointing out that the notions of personality we have nowadays, as well as the synonymic relationship between such phrases as “human being”, “subject of rights”, and “person”, conceals centuries of painstaking construction: semantic construction, because words are social artefacts, and legal construction, because legal concepts are the product of social meanings, as well as the producers thereof. The author attempts, thus, to retrieve from those subtle sliding movements in meaning, the threads that make up the warp and woof of a plot that has been woven since Aeschylus’s Prometheus, which finds in the Renaissance a fundamental perspective. After examining, in the first part, the connections between the notions of person, subject, subjective rights, and personal dignity, the second part deals with the notion of person and the assimilation of the concepts of “individual” and “person”. The act of looking up to the conceptual construction that took place during the Renaissance, still present within our legal and dogmatic tool set, allows us to keep the necessary distance to realise that, nowadays, the notion of human person calls for new differentiating criteria for the categories of “person” and “thing” – much-needed principles, for example, in the field of research done with human embryo cells, which depends upon the definition of whether all “human beings” should be considered “persons”.