222 Book Reviews © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001012 Robert Spaemann Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something” (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017). 272 pp. $26.95 paperback. It is well-known that much theology—especially in the ancient and medieval periods—attempts to describe God apophatically: careful consideration of what God is not is said to produce important conclusions about what and who God is. This via negationis has its strengths as well as its flaws, but is still a handy method. Robert Spaemann applies this method in his latest offering, Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something.” In this relatively short but dense book, Spaemann provides substantive analysis about what persons are by distinguishing what persons do from what nonpersons do. But this is no mere case of positing—in good Sartrean fashion—that human existence pre- cedes essence. No, this is a sophisticated investigation into what makes persons unique among all other existing entities through a focus on those activities, pri- marily of the mind, that enable one to understand human beings as persons. Spaemann begins with extended reflections—contained within the first three introductory chapters—on the origin of the concept “person” noting that without Christian tradition, the West would not have such a concept at all (17). The ancient Greeks prior to the dawning of Christian faith had no focused theory of person, though there were elements of their work that contributed to such a theory. For example, Aristotle’s three means of persuasion provide insight into what persons are (or may be), for they presuppose things that later became ascriptions of personhood. But whatever Aristotle said about the qual- ity of character of the speaker (ethos), the emotional condition of the listeners ( pathos), or the intellectual merit of the argument (logos) was only of tangen- tial concern in the constitution of the human being—what mattered primarily was the art and techniques necessary to persuade, to induce a response of agreement. It took the Christological debates of the earliest Christian centuries and the Trinitarian debates that followed, to provide the cognitive apparatus necessary to begin to ask and answer the question: what is a person? The earli- est Christian theologians borrowed language from Roman jurisprudence and Greek ontology to develop notions that became the basis of the idea. Spae- mann’s recognition of the origin of the concept necessarily and rightly shows its Christian pedigree without suggesting that the theological context remains compulsory for later development. With the etymological question satisfied, Spaemann moves to his main pur- pose: establishing the concept, that is, filling it with substance by saying that a person is a subject known by its acts without being reducible to them— a person is greater than the sum of its actions. The acts of a person happen