Masterclass with Marya Schechtman

Masterclass with Marya Schechtman (University of Illinois, Chicago)

November 6th (day before OZSW conference), 13:00 – 18:00, Radboud University Nijmegen

The masterclass is organized for a small group of research MA students, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers, and will center around Schechtman’s new book with OUP: Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life.

In her new book, Schechtman tackles the question of whether and how practical concerns are relevant for personal identity. In so doing, she explores the following questions, which will also be central for the discussion:

• Are practical considerations part of what defines our metaphysical identities? (e.g. Ch. 1)
• Should questions concerning moral responsibility and practical identity be pursued separately from questions concerning our identity over time, as e.g. Korsgaard and Olson have suggested? (e.g. Ch. 2)
• What is the scope and justification of personhood? (e.g. Ch 3)
• What is the role of our socio-cultural infrastructures for living the life of a person? (e.g. Ch 5)
• If persons are bio/psycho/social beings, then what are the implications of these features for their numerical identity? (e.g. Ch. 6, 7)

Participants will be expected to have read the book before the masterclass. The masterclass itself will be devoted to an intensive discussion of the central questions from the book and will conclude with a dinner.

To apply, please send a short CV and a brief statement of interest (max. 400 words) before October 1st  to the organizer, Fleur Jongepier [email protected]

Please note: places are limited. Notification before October 6th.

Marya Schechtman will also give the keynote lecture of the Annual Dutch OZSW conference, held in Nijmegen, 7th-8th November 2014.

Book overview:

Judgments of personal identity stand at the heart of our daily transactions. Family life, friendships, institutions of justice, and systems of compensation all rely on our ability to reidentify people. It is not as obvious as it might at first appear just how to express this relation between facts about personal identity and practical interests in a philosophical account of personal identity. A natural thought is that whatever relation is proposed as the one which constitutes the sameness of a person must be important to us in just the way identity is. This simple understanding of the connection between personal identity and practical concerns has serious difficulties, however. One is that the relations that underlie our practical judgments do not seem suited to providing a metaphysical account of the basic, literal continuation of an entity. Another is that the practical interests we associate with identity are many and varied and it seems impossible that a single relation could simultaneously capture what is necessary and sufficient for all of them. Staying Alive offers a new way of thinking about the relation between personal identity and practical interests which allows us to overcome these difficulties and to offer a view in which the most basic and literal facts about personal identity are inherently connected to practical concerns. This account, the 'Person Life View', sees persons as unified loci of practical interaction, and defines the identity of a person in terms of the unity of a characteristic kind of life made up of dynamic interactions among biological, psychological, and social attributes and functions mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.