CFP: Synthese Topical Collection "Back to Personal Identity"

Personal identity was one of the most discussed philosophical topics during the 1970s and 1990s. However, in the ensuing decades, the focus on the metaphysics of persons has waned despite significant advancements in related areas of analytic metaphysics.This topical collection aims to bring personal identity back to the forefront of the metaphysical debate in light of the progress made in fields such as grounding, nonmodal essentialism, new approaches to persistence and modality, higher-order logic and metaphysics, fictionalism, plenitude, non-classical mereologies, causal powers. We invite submissions about the possible interactions between personal identity and these themes of contemporary metaphysics.

Appropriate Topics for Submission include, among others:

● Should the identity and persistence conditions for persons explain or ground what persons are?

● How can animalism and neo-Lockean characterizations of personhood be adapted to non-modal, Finean approaches to essentialism?

● Can new solutions to the many-thinkers and personite problems exploit the nonclassical, non-extensional mereologies explored in the last decades?

● What recent approaches to persistence in time can be confronted with the personite problem? Is this problem solved or alleviated by resorting to these new approaches?

● Are there new approaches to persistence that can be used in personal identity?

● Given various metaphysical and logical accounts of modality, how do persons extend across possible worlds?

● How do the recent doctrines about material plenitude affect the metaphysical status of persons and person-like entities?

● What is the impact of higher-order logic and metaphysics on personal identity?

● The contemporary debates about grounding and fundamentality have reshaped the concepts of realism, reductionism, and elimination. What is the impact of these novelties on personal identity?

● Can we rephrase the classical Lewis-Parfit debate about survival and identity in new ways?

● Are persons, human beings, human animals, their temporal parts, their minds – the various entities involved in characterizing who we are – plausible bearers of causal powers and agentivity? How do we deal with the ensuing risks of overpopulation?

● What other innovative metaphysical tools can be applied to persons and personal identity?

For further information, please contact the guest editor(s):

[email protected], [email protected]

Please select the topical collection when submitting the paper.