The Essence of Corporation and Corporate Personality through Ontological Perspective
Keywords:
corporation; legal person; legal fiction; nature of corporation; ontology of the person; separate corporate personality; definition of the person; anthropomorphizationAbstract
In modern world corporations play a crucial economic, social and legal role. Both organizationally and in its very essence, a corporation represents a complex phenomenon in which numerous interesting and quite problematic issues intersect, with one of the most significant being the nature of the corporation itself. As a participant in legal relations, it is equalized with the physical person as a “legal entity” with its own separate personality. Despite this fact, a legal person, in and of itself, is undoubtedly a legal fiction lacking its own physical distinctiveness and veritable existence, bereft of the capability to cognize its own actions and to make decisions without its constituent physical individuals.
As a fictional phenomenon, both sociologically and philosophically, having its origins in the attribution of human properties by humans themselves to such certain phenomena (i.e. anthropomorphization), detailed analysis of corporation and its corporate personality as well as the study of its interrelation with its constituent natural individuals is necessary to ascertain, what does it precisely represent from ontological standpoint and not only what specific descriptive characteristics its bears in the eye of the law.
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