The Acting Person

Karol Wojtyła's principal philosophical work, published in December 1969 by the Polish Theological Society in Kraków while he was archbishop of Kraków. It is a study in philosophical anthropology that sets out to understand the human person through the experience of action: in acting consciously and freely, a person is not merely something that happens but the cause of the act, and through action determines, possesses and governs himself. The book joins the metaphysical framework of Thomas Aquinas to a phenomenological analysis of consciousness and experience, and its last chapter turns to action performed together with others in a community of persons. Rocco Buttiglione has described the Thomist philosophy in it as a fundamental hypothesis that the phenomenological analysis verifies and deepens. An English version, The Acting Person, appeared in 1979; the Polish title is also rendered Person and Act. Its account of the person underlies his later theology of the body and his social teaching.