Phenomenology and Personal Identity

The conference “Phenomenology and Personal Identity” addresses the question of a possible relation between recent phenomenological research on selfhood and the question of personal identity. The current discussion on personal identity focuses primarily on the so-called “persistence question”: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a person at time t1 to be the same as a person at time t2? Apart from the question of the persistence of a person across time (and his or her “re-identification”), there is also the question of the enduring (or constant) individual characteristics of a person. Both issues can be addressed in terms of a phenomenological inquiry into selfhood, more precisely, into the temporality, spatiality, narrativity, and normativity of selfhood.