Personhood and the “ multiple self ” view 1

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2016

This paper critically assesses the supposition that the best way to capture the intuition that the concept of personhood has practical importance is to analyse personhood in terms of multiple selves. It explores the works of David Velleman and, more recently, Stanley Klein in illuminating the multiple self model. The paper argues that the reasons driving belief in multiple selves, and the subsequent conceptual distinctions between selves that David Velleman encourages, has not been sufficiently motivated. Among other things, it makes the point that Velleman's theory of self is plagued with the problem of ambiguity and arbitrariness. It also argues that Stanley Klein's recent attempt to ground the belief in multiple selves in empirical analysis is fraught with difficulties. 3 For more on identity, and specifically how questions of numerical identity and psychological connectedness may come apart, see Derek Parfit (1984). 4 In order to rule out cases in which an actual subject stipulates that a notional past subject who, for instance, witnessed the walls of Jericho falling down is self-same, Velleman adds that genuine "self to self" relations over time are ones that are "unselfconscious", involving no prior psychological act of stipulation (2006a, 198).

Comparative Philosophy, 2016

Marya Schechtman has given us reasons to think that there are different questions that compose personal identity. On the one hand, there is the question of reidentification, which concerns what makes a person the same person through different time-slices. On the other hand, there is the question of characterization, which concerns the actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, etc. that we take to be attributable to a person over time. While leaving the former question for another work, Schechtman answers the latter question by proposing what she terms the narrative self-constitution view, whereby Schechtman claims that we account for intuitive features (moral responsibility, survival, compensation, and self-interested concern) of characterization through narratives. Still, merely having a narrative is not enough. In order to live the life of a person, an agent's narrative must sync with the narrative told about him/her in community. This paper, while in full agreement with Schechtman's claim regarding narratives and their ability to explain the intuitive features that regard the question of characterization, puts pressure on the latter claim. I argue that a person's narrative is not merely one that synchs with the narrative told in community, but one that is determined by the person's community. In focusing on Schechtman's second claim, I appeal to the Akan conception of personhood, showing that the community sets the parameters of personal identity, and by body politics and conferring social recognition, determines the traits that we take to be attributed to a given person over time.

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).

1998

This study is about the nature of persons and personal identity. It belongs to a tradition that maintains that in order to understand what it is to be a person we must clarify what personal identity consists in. In this pursuit, I differentiate between the problems (i) How do persons persist? and (ii) What facts, if any, does personal identity consist in? In chapters 2-3,1 discuss matters related to the first question. In chapter 2,1 discuss 'identity' and 'criterion of identity'. I argue that we ought to understand 'identity' as numerical identity. A 'criterion of identity', I argue, should be understood as a specification of the essential conditions for being an object of some sort S. In chapter 3,1 distinguish between two different accounts of how persons persist; the endurance view (persons persist three-dimensionally through time), and the perdurance view (persons persist four-dimensionally in virtue of having numerically distinct temporal parts). I argue that the endurance view of persons is ontologically prior to the perdurance view; on the ground that objects must always be individuated under some substance sortal concept S (the sortal dependency of individuation), and that the concept person entails that objects falling under it are three-dimensional. In chapter 4-8, I discuss the second problem. I differentiate between Criterianists, who maintain that it is possible to specify a non-circular and informative criterion for personal identity, and Non-Criterianists, who deny that such a specification is possible. In chapter 5-7,1 consider in turn Psychological Criterianism, Physical Criterianism and Animalism. I argue that none of these accounts is adequate on the ground that they are either (i) circular, (ii) violate the intrinsicality of identity, or (iii) do not adequately represent what we are essentially. In chapter 8, I discuss Non-Criterianism. I consider in turn Cartesianism, The Subjective view and Psychological Substantialism. Against these accounts I argue that they wrongly assume that 'person' refers to mental entities. In chapter 9,1 formulate a biological Non-Criterianistic approach to personal identity; the Revised Animal Attribute View. Person is a basic sortal concept which picks out a biological sort of enduring persons. A person, then, is an animal whose identity as person is primitive in relation to his identity as an animal. I claim that the real essence of a person is determined by the real essence of the kind of animal he is, without thereby denying that persons have a real essence as persons.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking...

E-Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005

Psychology has been increasingly recognising the multiplicity of the self. However, this recognition raises the problem of explaining how a sense of self-identity is achieved within a multiplicity of selves. Two theoretical orientations playing a major role in the study of the plurality of the self: the social-cognitive perspective, in which self is studied as an information-processing device, and the social constructionist framework, in which self is understood as a matter of social and linguistic negotiation. Nevertheless, it is argued that these orientations are still trapped in several epistemological problems and the final result leaves no space for subjectivity. Dialogism and the dialogical view of the self are presented as possible solutions for those problems. Conceiving self as a result of the dialogicality, unity and multiplicity appear as two contrasting, but united poles of a dialogical and (inter)subjective self. The multiplicity of the self has been a topic of discussion for a long time. The human intuition that each one of us has a single and continuous entity seems to be paradoxically denied by the recognition that each person goes through several changes during the life cycle. The debate is quite old: at least, we can trace its origins to John Locke's question "how can I be the same I was in my past?" (see Locke, 1689. When the soul ceased to be the warranty of continuity, personal identity became a problem . This problem could be regarded as just a pure philosophical question, without any implications to psychology. However, psychologists started to deal with this matter, when they began to ask questions relating to selfhood, at least ever since William James (1890). Moreover, this play between sameness and difference, unity and multiplicity, has also implications for the construction of research methods, collection of data, preferred modes of analyses, and even strategies of psychological intervention.

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.

Please note this is my original doctoral research proposal. As my research developed my focus has changed from the way it is described here. Most importantly, I became less interested in the question of selfhood and more interested in that of the constitution of agency. This thesis explores the question of personal identity over time: how do we explain or test whether one is the same person at two points in time? It bridges two philosophical traditions – the analytic Anglo-American strand, which deals with this question as phrased above, and the continental tradition whose focus is different. Following a critical examination of the debates on personal identity in the analytic tradition I posit that there is no criterion that can explain personal identity and that the concept of person is problematic. I provisionally accept reductionism, a stand from the contemporary literature claiming that sometimes questions about personal identity are not answerable and moreover, they are not what matters. However, I criticise this stand for leaving a number of significant questions unanswered and reducing certain existential categories to causality (e.g. life connectedness, existential mine-ness). I argue that these problems can be resolved by referring to the self as an existential project, which does not bring the Cartesian baggage carried by personhood. I find fertile ground for discussing this in the continental tradition, especially in the work of Martin Heidegger. I plan to demonstrate that an explanation of meaning in day-today life and of how one becomes who one is requires a particular understanding of time, which leads me to distinguish between different modes of time. I argue that the mode of time which is compatible with and required by the preceding discussion of the self, originary temporality, cannot be conceived as a series of moments, is essentially not sequential and the Past, Present and Future coexist rather than following one another. I then distinguish this approach of time from what is called the A-theory and the B-theory of time in order to show that this approach differs from the contemporary literature on time and thus deserves further reseach. Next, I argue that originary temporality is related to and explains the ordinary conception of time, that which is experience in day-today life and which is made up of qualitative sequential nows. This step compels me to deal with the concerns raised in the contemporary body of literature claiming that this would amount to temporal idealism. In doing so I reject some of the arguments put forward by Heidegger and develop my own account of time. Having contended that in order to deal with the issues left unanswered by the reductionist theory of personal identity recourse to the self is needed and that this commits the discussion to a particular mode of non-sequential time, I return to the debate on personal identity. In contrast with the current research on this topic, I aim to show that the problem of personal identity dissolves. This is because if we do not conceive of time essentially as a sequence of moments we cannot accurately compare persons and selves at different moments in time.

Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches, 2021