Abstract:
Whereas early liberal thinkers developed the concept of the ethically accountable continuous forensic modern European person in contrast to what they saw as the discontinuous and hence unaccountable mimetic person, Professor Lambek argues that forensic and mimetic are better understood both as ideologies of personhood and as dimensions of all persons rather than as fully distinctive kinds of persons. He presents an account of persons as accountable for their acts but shows that this is not limited to the maximally continuous and autonomous person of liberal ideology. He reviews other forms of personhood encountered cross-culturally and suggests that the mimetic dimension
offsets some of the problems inherent in an exclusively forensic model.