Personale Identität als Praktische Einheit - Einzelansicht

We will decide in the first session whether the seminar will be held in English or German. This will depend on whether international students want to particpate. 

In der ersten Sitzung wird gemeinsam entschieden, ob das Seminar auf Englisch oder Deutsch abgehalten wird. Die Entscheidung wird davon abhängen, ob internationale Studierende teilnehmen möchten. 

Who am I? What makes me the person I am? Am I the same person who...? What explains the unity of a person, both at a time and over time? What about cases of alienation, ambivalence and fragmentation? We will pursue these and other questions discussed under the heading of "personal identity" from a particular angle: we will exclusively deal with practically oriented accounts as vindicated by Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, Christine Korsgaard, and Marya Schechtman, amongst others. Despite some significant differences, they all draw special attention to activities of agency in order to explain the synchronic and/or diachronic unity of one's own life.

The structure of the seminar will be as follows: After an initial introduction into the problem of personal identity - here, we will be looking into the distinctions made between different questions of personal identity (Logi Gunnarsson, Michael Quante) - we will proceed with addressing concepts and themes crucial to the aforementioned agency-based accounts, such as intengrity, self-interpretation, self-constitution, narration, alienation and the relation between morality, rationality and self. The last couple of sessions will be devoted to exploring the difficult cases: Can we be "wholeheartedly" ambivalent, to use Frankfurt's words? Is ambivalence a form of self-alienation (Gunnarsson)? Can a single human being embody multiple persons? And, can we decide to split up (Carol Rovane)?

Das Seminar wird in Kürze auch für das Modul "Vertiefung Theoretische Philosophie" geöffnet. 

Die Texte werden zu Beginn des Semesters auf Moodle hochgeladen.

The texts will be uploaded on moodle at the beginning of the semester.