Prospective Readings

Texts, cases, and media nominated by the group but not yet scheduled. Readings that have been assigned to a session appear on the schedule instead, and the questions these were nominated against are in research questions.

Law and legal scholarship

• Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (New Zealand) — the act granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River. Proposed as the focus of a full session. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2017/7/en/latest/
• Miriama Cribb, Elizabeth Macpherson & Axel Borchgrevink, "Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River: collaboration and pluralism in implementing the Te Awa Tupua Act" (2024), The International Journal of Human Rights — a companion to the Act. It moves attention away from legal personality and onto three elements of how the settlement works in practice: the centrality of Māori kawa (value-based Indigenous law), the new institutions and practices the Act established, and the devolution of authority to hapū and communities. Its case studies are Te Pūwaha, the revitalisation of the Port of Whanganui, and Te Kōpuka nā Te Awa Tupua, the collaborative group developing a strategy for the river. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2024.2314532
• Lawrence B. Solum, "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences" (1992), 70 N.C. L. Rev. 1231. https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol70/iss4/4/
• Margaret Jane Radin, "Property and Personhood" (1982) — nominated with an interest in updating it for the present. https://cyber.harvard.edu/IPCoop/82radi.html
• Carol M. Rose, "Crystals and Mud in Property Law" (1988), 40 Stan. L. Rev. 577 — offered as "not quite personhood, but related to the question of boundary conditions": property rules oscillate between hard-edged "crystal" rules and muddy standards. Speaks directly to the observation from the first session that identity often starts as a porous boundary and is later rendered crystal clear. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1228813
• "What is a Tort?", Harvard Law Review vol. 139 — offered as relevant to how tort law reshaped corporate personhood. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-139/what-is-a-tort/
• Paul Schiff Berman, "Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects" (1994), 69 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 288 — the trials of animals and objects held across Europe from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, read as a way communities explained harm caused by nonhuman actors, and what that social function of trials suggests for the present. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430586
• Two working papers on AI, values, and liability — the first reads Hume on the potential for values to emerge from repeated iteration against an objective or benchmark; the second considers existing liability regimes as applied to AI agents. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=7334643 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7350103
• Old law school paper on tort liability and AI — being updated by a group member, who may bring sources on historical models of tort liability as applied to animals, and on how corporations affected tort liability.
• Papers on law and perspectivism — recently completed by a group member and offered as non-Western and alternative-modern frameworks for personhood. References to follow.

Philosophy and theory

• David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (1748) — nominated as one of the earliest modern texts attempting to construct personhood. https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/nc
• "Boundary object" — background for the question of whether personhood is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_object
• "The Replacements: Capgras and the Anthropocene", Endnotes — on a world of adversarial doubles and surreptitious imitation. https://endnotes.cc/p/the-replacements-capgras-and-the
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) — offered alongside the above. Cohen's opening essay, "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)", makes the monster the harbinger of category crisis, which is the frame being borrowed here. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsq4d
• Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016) — raised in the first session for the anecdote of the rock formation "Two Women Sitting Down", destroyed by a mining company, and the legal system's inability to hold both frameworks at once: destruction of property versus murder of a being.
• "A Good Death" essay, Summer of Protocols — described as especially generative. https://summerofprotocols.com/good-death-web
• G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) — the source Radin's "Property and Personhood" (under law, above) is working from: Hegel treats property as the first external embodiment of the person's freedom.
• Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge University Press, 1987; revised edition Temple University Press,
  1995. — includes a sustained account of the Akan concept of a person.
• Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies (Stanford University Press, 2016; Italian 2014), trans. Adam Kotsko — the concluding volume of the Homo Sacer series.
• Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2018) — an account of general intelligence, human or artificial, built from Hegel, Sellars, and Brandom.
• Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020) — reads the animals of African American literature as a critique of the category of "Man".

Anthropology, history, and social theory

• Marcel Mauss, "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self" (1938) — the Huxley Memorial Lecture, tracing the category of the person from masks and roles, through the Roman persona as a legal status, to the modern self. English translation by W. D. Halls in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins & Steven Lukes (eds.), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Ian Hacking, "Making Up People" (1986), in Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna & David E. Wellbery (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford University Press) — new ways of classifying people bring new kinds of people into being. Hacking returned to the argument in a 2006 London Review of Books essay of the same title. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people
• Harvey Sacks, "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'", in J. Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action (Cambridge University Press, 1984) — being ordinary as work people actively do, not a default state.
• Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (Columbia University Press, 1995) — medieval debates over bodily resurrection, and what they show about identity understood as bound to the material body.
• Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton University Press, 2011; German Bild-Anthropologie, 2001), trans. Thomas Dunlap — images, their media, and the body, including images made to stand in for the bodies of the dead.

Life, sentience, and intelligence

• Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Michael Levin, "What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life" (2026), Biological Theory — uses LLMs to cluster definitions of life collected from experts across disciplines, and finds a continuous landscape of themes, suggesting that what has been treated as a binary taxonomic problem is better seen as differentiated perspectives in one conceptual space. Open access; preprint 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-026-00544-9 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849
• Gregory Chaitin, "Toward a Mathematical Definition of 'Life'" (1979), in R. D. Levine & M. Tribus (eds.), The Maximum Entropy Formalism (MIT Press) — borrows compression and randomness from algorithmic information theory to measure the "organized complexity" of simple structures, as groundwork for studying the origins of life mathematically. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mathematical-definition-of-life
• Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI (Oxford University Press, 2024) — how to act under uncertainty about which beings are sentient, across disorders of consciousness, fetuses, neural organoids, invertebrates, and AI. Open access. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-edge-of-sentience-9780192870421
• N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017) — cognition without consciousness, in humans, other organisms, and technical systems.
• Karawynn Long, "Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence" (2023), Nine Lives — treating fluency in language as a measure of intelligence has long harmed disabled people, nonspeaking autistic and deaf people especially, and LLMs now make that mistake everyone's problem. https://ninelives.karawynnlong.com/p/language-is-a-poor-heuristic-for-intelligence
• Rua M. Williams, "All Robots Are Disabled", in Social Robots in Social Institutions: Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2022 — how disability stigma shapes the way people relate to robots, and a proposal for "cripped" human–robot relations drawing on disabled cyborg scholarship. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/FAIA220622

Collectives and complex systems

• Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, "Scaling and Hierarchy in Urban Economies" (2011) — a re-analysis of the claim by Bettencourt, West and collaborators that urban economic output scales super-linearly with population. The data cannot tell power laws from other forms; the apparent scaling is largely an artefact of using city-wide totals rather than per-capita rates; and what size effect remains is explained by high-value specialist industries concentrating in larger cities. https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.4101
• Natalia Vélez, Charley M. Wu, Samuel J. Gershman & Eric Schulz, "The rise and fall of technological development in virtual communities" (2024) — 2,700 communities built from scratch in the multiplayer game One Hour One Life. Communities survive by balancing diversification, which develops new technologies, against specialisation, which maintains existing ones; imbalances in specialisation are an early sign of population collapse. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tz4dn

Digital identity and proof of personhood

Nominated on the grounds that determining something has personhood is only half the problem: it is also getting increasingly difficult to prove you are that thing in a digital context.

• "Proof of personhood: What it is and why it's needed", World (Worldcoin), 21 February 2024 — the case for verifying humanness and uniqueness online as AI advances, and for World ID's iris-biometric protocol as the way to do it. https://world.org/blog/world/proof-of-personhood-what-it-is-why-its-needed
• Puja Ohlhaver, Mikhail Nikulin & Paula Berman, "Compressed to 0: The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood" (2024) — the counterweight. Chronicles Idena's proof-of-personhood experiment from its 2019 launch to a crisis in May 2022: the protocol verified humans successfully, but hidden pools emerged in which "puppeteers" paid people $2–$14 every few weeks for their secret keys and ran their accounts. By May 2022, 23 entities — under 0.6% of the network's distinct entities — controlled some 40% of accounts and half the rewards. Filtering humans from bots turned out not to touch the harder problem of filtering humans acting like bots. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4749892 (annotated copy: https://ia601600.us.archive.org/35/items/elopio-papers/2024-compressed_to_0-annotated.pdf)

Fiction

• Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023) — turns on this topic directly: its world rests on a historical event, the Great Bargain, during which humanity learned to endow other creatures (from robots to animals) with human-level intelligence, so the "who speaks for the trees" problem is partly dissolved by technology — the moose, the cat, the train can literally talk. Two reviews if the novel itself is too long for a session: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-different-bargain-with-nature-on-annalee-newitzs-the-terraformers/ https://www.andrewliptak.com/annalee-newitz-the-terrraformers-sci-fi-book-review/
• Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea — a meditation on nonhuman consciousness.
• Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction — novella, on related ground.
• Stanisław Lem, The Invincible — the necroevolved swarm: collective cognition and intelligence without apparent sentience, consciousness, or experience.
• Peter Watts, Blindsight — same problem from the other direction.

Media

• 99% Invisible, episode 496, "The Rights of Rice and Future of Nature" — covers a case in which wild rice (Manoomin) sues the Minnesota DNR. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/496-the-rights-of-rice-and-future-of-nature/
• Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Home Soil" — crystalline life that calls humans "ugly bags of mostly water." One entry on what would be a long and very good Star Trek personhood watch list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Soil
• "Spain's controversial plan for the world's first octopus farm has been abandoned", BBC Future — several nations and US states are banning octopus farming before it begins. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260731-spains-attempt-to-farm-octopuses-has-failed
• Mel Baggs, "In My Language" (2007) — video. The first half shows Baggs's own way of interacting with their surroundings; the second translates it into English. https://youtu.be/JnylM1hI2jc

Background

• William O. Douglas — author of the Sierra Club v. Morton dissent read in the first session. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_O._Douglas