Individuals

An individual is a person or a specific object. Individuality (or ) is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly of being a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs or goals. The exact definition of an individual is important in the fields of biology, law, and philosophy.

From the 15th century and earlier (and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics) individual meant "indivisible", typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning "a person". From the 17th century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism.

in American law:

The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law states: A "natural person" is "A human being as distinguished from person (as a corporation) created by operation of law. A 1910 legal dictionary states: "Individual: As a noun, this term denotes a single person as distinguished from a group or class, and also, very commonly, a private or natural person as distinguished from a partnership, corporation, or association."

Early empiricists such as Ibn Tufail in early 12th century Islamic Spain, and John Locke in late 17th century England, introduced the idea of the individual as a tabula rasa ("blank slate"), shaped from birth by experience and education. This ties into the idea of the liberty and rights of the individual, society as a social contract between rational individuals, and the beginnings of individualism as a doctrine.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel regarded history as the gradual evolution of Mind as it tests its own concepts against the external world. Each time the mind applies its concepts to the world, the concept is revealed to be only partly true, within a certain context; thus the mind continually revises these incomplete concepts so as to reflect a fuller reality (commonly known as the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis). The individual comes to rise above his or her own particular viewpoint, and grasps that he or she is a part of a greater whole insofar as he or she is bound to family, a social context, and/or a political order.

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