1 Personhood and recognition Heikki Ikäheimo h.ikaheimo@unsw.edu.au Draft 2019.06.28. To appear in Siep, Ikäheimo & Quante (eds.): Handbuch Anerkennung. Springer. Keywords: legal personhood, moral personhood, intersubjective personhood, psychological personhood Abstract It is widely thought that recognition is somehow important or even essential for human persons. This general thought comes however in many variations which are what this entry aims to systematize. Comprehending the several variations and what is rational in them requires, firstly, systematizing the many concepts of personhood present in the various relevant discourses, secondly systematizing the many concepts of recognition present in them, and thirdly grasping the many possible and actual ways in which recognition according to the different concepts of recognition is important or essential for persons according to the different concepts of personhood. Finally, the entry discusses briefly Fichte’s and Hegel’s theorizing on the connections of personhood and recognition. Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 2. What is it to be a person? ........................................................................................................................ 2 3. What is recognition? ................................................................................................................................ 3 4. What is the connection of recognition to personhood? ........................................................................ 4 5. Fichte and Hegel on personhood and recognition ............................................................................... 6 Literature...................................................................................................................................................... 8 1. Introduction One of the most widely accepted ideas about recognition is that it is somehow important or even essential for who or what we are as human persons. Whereas there has been a strong focus in recent political philosophy on the connection of recognition to who some person or some people are, or in other words to personal identity (see Quante 2012), the pioneers on recognition J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel were more focused on its connection to what we are, namely persons, or in other words on the connection of recognition to personhood. These two perspectives on the importance of recognition are not unrelated since only persons have a personal identity in the relevant sense; yet the philosophical