Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

2016

One of the most debated topics in medieval philosophy was the metaphysics of identity—that is, what accounts for the distinctness (non-identity) of different individuals of the same, specific kind and the persistence (self-identity) of the same individuals over time and in different possible situations, especially with regard to individuals of our specific kind, namely, human persons. The first three papers of this volume investigate the comparative development of positions. One problem, considered by William of Auvergne and Albert the Great, deals with Aristotle’s doctrine of the active intellect and its relation to Christian philosophical conceptions of personhood. A larger set of issues on the nature and post-mortem fate of human beings is highlighted as common inquiry among Muslim philosophers and Thomas Aquinas, as well as Aquinas and the modern thinker John Locke. Finally, the last two papers offer a debate over Aquinas’s exact views regarding whether substances persist identically across metaphysical “gaps” (periods of non-existence), either by nature or divine power.

In this article, I develop how the phenomenological understanding of the intentionality of consciousness allows us to formulate a theory of personal identity that can at least (1) account for the continuity of consciousness through time, (2) provide an account of a certain aspect of what it means to be a person, namely to be able to appropriate one’s past as one’s own, and (3) give an original answer to the question of personal identity and state in what the identity of a person through time consists. After having developed the outlines for such a phenomenological theory of personal identity, I conclude that the provided account of the person is the correlate of the phenomenological concept of world.

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson).

Miscellanea Historico-Iuridica, 2019

Any discussion on a person's right to identity ought to start with a study of the content of a person's identity. While ascertaining the essence of a person's identity, the author was inclined to think that the development of a personal identity as a permanent concept was promoted by the genesis of the human dignity, individuality, autonomy and personality of a person. It is human dignity, the manifestation of which, inter alia, is to be found in the person's identity, which forms the basis of its legal protection, transforming the identity of a person into legal value and, accordingly, creating the right of a person to identity. Thus the article provides a legally philosophical insight into the historical circumstances in which the concept of personal identity arose, and that are essential for a comprehensive modern understanding of the concept.

2012

t h e p r o j e c t One worthwhile task for philosophy is to give an overview of a whole domain of thought and to present the conceptual relationships that characterize it. The domain we have striven to portray in this introduction, on a quite general level with a broad brush, is the contemporary debate about personal identity over time. We proceed as follows: First, we specify the metaphysical question of personal identity tackled in this volume: namely, what makes a person P 1 at t 1 identical to a person P 2 at t 2 ? Second, we discuss views which analyze personal identity in terms of bodily and psychological relations. Problems associated with these theories have recently made a fourdimensional interpretation of such views quite popular. The following section presents this canny metaphysical alternative to traditional threedimensional views. Finally we discuss a rather neglected approach to personal identity over time, the so-called "simple view," according to which personal identity does not consist in anything other than itself; it is simple and unanalyzable. Eric Olson once suggested that the simple view is poorly understood, and therefore deserves more attention than it has received so far (Olson 2010, section 3).

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1996

In contemporary times, the picture of the unified self is variously attacked. The directions from which criticisms flow are manifold; feminist, philosophical, postmodernist; psychoanalytical and sociological, to name a few. Each, in their own way, argues against unity and for multiplicity; against wholeness and for fragmentation. What I want to do here is to draw together, in a very loose way, some common threads in the highly disparate presentations on "Identity and the Sell" in order to (i) suggest that, for education, the traditional philosophical literature concerning personal identity is tangential; (ii) resist some postmodernist claims regarding multiple identities; (iii) eschew a certain use of national identity; and (iv) salvage the notion of fragmented and competing values that education must make help educands make sense of.