inanimate object

According to Wilfrid Sellars, inanimate objects are actually "truncated persons": "Nature became the locus of 'truncated persons' (...) not, however, because a *new* category of impersonal things and impersonal processes had been achieved, but because the category of *person* is now applied to these things in a pruned or truncated form" (Wilfrid Sellars _Science, Perception and Reality_ 13). Another way of saying this is that, at some former time, everything in the environment---including what we now refer to as "inanimate objects" were once afforded the full range of qualities associated with "personhood."