Staying Alive—Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10690918 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nils-Frederic Wagner, Nils‐Frederic Wagner (0000-0002-6145-2399, Ottawa University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 258 |
| Pages | 140-143 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pq/pqu055 |
| OpenAlex | W2322299009 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Imagine that you are recollecting your high school graduation day. You ask yourself: What makes it true that it was me, who had this graduation experience that I remember having? And, by the same token: What makes it true that it will be me who will still exist some time in the future? When you ask these questions, you are looking for the conditions of your persistence through time: your diachronic personal identity. Ever since The Constitution of Selves (1996) was published, Marya Schechtman has become one of the most influential philosophers of personal identity. Some twenty years later, her new book, Staying Alive , has recently been released by Oxford University Press. Herein, she gives a carefully argued, sustained, and comprehensive treatment of the relation between practical concerns and personal identity. Schechtman's account offers an alternative to the widely held view that the metaphysical status of persons is constitutive for numerical identity. What these views underestimate, according to her, is that many practical concerns are intrinsically related to facts about personal identity. In order to account for this inherent relation, a corresponding view of personhood is needed that defines a single, unified entity that is the target of all the practical concerns arising throughout a person's life. In doing so, she does not, however, place identity in something other than metaphysical considerations, since she thinks that metaphysical considerations can be practical. That is, she does not see a sharp divide between metaphysical and practical questions of personhood.
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Graduation (instrument) · Identity (music) · Metaphysics · Personal identity · Personhood · Relation (database) · Self · Sociology · Computer Science · Ethics in medical practice · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2022 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |