see: http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/personhood.

htm
according to kreeft
if one's not an essentialist, one must be a nominalist or functionalist
if one's not an absolutist, one must be a relativist
kreeft talks about common sense as if all of its concepts were necessarily classically
dened and shared the same characteristics, mapping equally onto reality with
consistent existential implications ... but they manifestly do not ...
see:
https://www.scribd.com/mobile/document/328539784/The-Conceptual-Confusion-Infe
cting-Every-School-of-Thought
and thus caricatures all who reject his essentialist stance as if they must therefore be
vulgar functionalists
when, instead, we can avoid both essentialism and nominalism, which are opposite
sides of the same bankrupt epistemic coin with a
fallibilist, pragmatic, semiotic realism
that doesn't mistake provisional, methodological stipulations for eternal, metaphysical
verities
that prescinds from the necessary to the probable in our modal ontology
being as precise as we can but as vague as we must
afrming noncontradiction but not overusing excluded middle
as few realities are either-or much less all or nothing, hence are realized in degrees

and availing ourselves of one of common sense's most potent tools, reductio ad
absurdum
kreeft also conates analogical predications of the concept, person, when making it a
supercategory
for all the ills that come from reducing persons to functions, kreeft fails to take account
of the absurdities (condemnations of masturbation, birth control, ivf, embryonic stem
cell research, morning after pills, etc) that have been articulated in such a moral
philosophy that is too essentialisric, deductive, abstract, physicalistic, biologistic, a
prioristic and rationalistic, all at the expense of those concrete lived experiences that are
part of --- not only our common sense, which he properly esteems, but --- our common
sensibilities, which he apparently dismisses, and our common law, which he apparently
ignores
for the theology of the body is not substantively personalist but has, instead, rst taken
essentialist conclusions as self evident, then, rearticulated them in a personalist style
rather than inductively gathering the data of our common sense, common sensibilities
and common law and seeing where that has led or might lead vis a vis human
value-realizations
and kreeft imaginatively over utilizes various slippery slope consequences over against
all evidence to the contrary in our human experience regarding how well arbitrary
boundaries have indeed worked in all areas of our human traditions, in our social and
moral norms as well as legal proscriptions and prescriptions
his immersion in potentiality language ignores the wisdom of hartshorne's nonstrict
identity and buddhist distinctions like no-self and empirical self vis a vis dynamical
realities with asymmetric temporal relations
common sense, common sensibilities and common law are not syllogisms
and kreeft's decision tree is facile
a zygote is not a person and everybody knows it's not, all sylly syllogisms aside
such a belief leads to absurd consequences that violate our moral instincts, aesthetic
sensibilities, ethical intuitions, visceral reactions and abductive inferences regarding
dynamical realities

and the only cure for a vulgar functionalism, facile nominalism or absolutist essentialism
is a fallibilist, pragmatic semiotic realism, which can clarify conceptual confusion and
phenomenologically bracket those metaphysics that prove too much, tell untellable tales,
saying way more than we can possibly know
peter kreeft, abortion, personhood, essentialism, functionalism, nominalism, nonstrict
identity, asymmetric temporal relations, theology of the body,pragmatic semiotic
realism