Theories of Personal Identity

The problem of symbolic lock-in has long plagued the study of culture, institutions, and ideology, where systems of language, ritual, or politics stabilize into closed loops. Once established, these lattices judge signals not by their correspondence with adaptive reality but by their compatibility with the code of the order itself. But what is often overlooked is that the most intimate and persistent form of symbolic lock-in is not external, but internal, the self. The “I” is not an irreducible fact of (...) being, but a symbolic compression of recursive processes, flows of sensation, memory, prediction, and cultural coding, that we mistake for the ground of subjectivity. This compression is adaptive in its emergence. It allows for coordination, continuity, and accountability. Yet once crystallized, it becomes a self-validating attractor, privileging internal narrative over external reality, creating prohibitive switching costs, and demanding that all incoming signals be assimilated into its categories. Humanity’s civilizational lock-ins, whether they be theological, political, or economic, are all fractal extensions of this primordial closure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Currently the subject of polarising debates and political instrumentalisation, identity politics - together with how it is entangled with identity as a lived but also theorisable experience consisting of discursive, material, and affective dimensions - is rightfully regarded as a complex phenomenon. This chapter unpacks some of this complexity by mapping out the matters - and matterings of - identity (politics) by means of a critical cartographical methodology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti. After sketching out (...) several critical materialist philosophical conceptualisations of identity (politics), such as those rooted in feminist standpoint theory, situated knowledges, intersectional activism and scholarship, queer theory, and queer of colour critique, a critical new materialist framework that continues along these matter(ings)-emphasising lines is presented. This critical new materialist framework, or put differently, an interferential, conceptualises identity as an always-shifting myriad of the discursive-material-affective. This interference-based framework not only allows for a more conceptually clear and multifocal theorisation of all things identity, consequently highlighting a coalitional identities-based politics but it also demonstrates that contemporary critical new materialist thought builds on preceding feminist materialist paradigms. (shrink)

One of the important determinants of development during the transition to adulthood is the undertaking of social roles characteristic of adults, also in the area of finishing formal education, which usually coincides with beginning fulltime employment. In the study discussed in this paper, it has been hypothesized that continuing full-time education above the age of 26, a phenomenon rarely observed in Poland, can be considered as an unpunctual event that may be connected with difficulties in the process of identity formation. (...) Relationships between identity dimensions and identity statuses, and age and educational context were analyzed. 693 individuals aged 19-35 took part in the study. The participants attended three types of educational institutions: (1) full-time university studies (BA or MA level), (2) part-time university studies (BA or MA level), and (3) full-time post-secondary school (certificate courses such as: medical rescue, massage therapy, cosmetology, occupational therapy). Among the students of full-time university studies predictable dependencies, also in respect of highlevels of indicators of identity crisis and a high frequency of diffused identity occurrence, were observed. Such dependencies were not found in the group of full-time post-secondary school students. (shrink)

In contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, the sense of our personal existence that several classical philosophers have believed to permeate our experience is typically cashed out in terms of the ubiquity of our inner awareness of our own experience. In this paper, I address the issue of what grounds such an inner awareness, arguing against the widespread view that it obtains in virtue of a more fundamental awareness the occurrent experience has of itself. This is the state elf-awareness view (SSV). (...) Specifically, I argue that all versions of SSV are bedevilled by what I call the problem of state awareness, that is, the problem of understanding why and how a mental state-level relation like state self-awareness could recover a subject-level relation like inner awareness. I also defend the depth of this problem by blocking a potential solution to it. (shrink)

Psychology today pathologizes all aspects of the human condition without ever examining its own ills, which have caused it to become fragmented. People from non-Western backgrounds are often adversely affected by the limitations of the discipline, and often avoid treatment altogether. By contrast, a true “science of the soul” has existed for millennia in all the world’s diverse spiritual cultures. Although a plethora of modern therapies are now available, they are hindered in their efficacy by having become entirely divorced from (...) sacred reality. This work argues that it is necessary to restore this “science of the soul” by drawing on the perspective of non-Western wisdom traditions as understood since time immemorial. Examples are given of the fundamental differences that are found between modern psychology and the traditional psychologies of various religions, which also existed in the West prior to the Enlightenment era. Furthermore, this book will show how non-Western philosophy can help rehabilitate an authentically healing psychology in support of promoting sound mental health in our afflicted modern culture. Sacred psychologies, therefore, afford us the best opportunity to tackle the innumerable challenges that confront human beings today, such as trauma, mental illness, addiction, death, and the meaning of our lives. (shrink)

Neste artigo, originalmente escrito em 2019, abordamos o conceito de identidade pessoal, de Derek Parfit, por meio do experimento mental do teletransporte aplicado à edição genética de embriões com síndrome de Down. Parfit propõe que o teletransporte, no momento em que destrói o original e produz uma duplicata, não preserva a identidade numérica. Similarmente, sugerimos que a terapia gênica através da edição genética ao substituir o material deficiente de um embrião, geraria um novo indivíduo. Desse modo, elaboramos uma situação hipotética (...) para sustentar que essa intervenção romperia com a continuidade física e psicológica do indivíduo original, i.e., haveria duas pessoas, uma antes e outra após a “morte” da primeira. Em contrapartida, analisamos a ideia de que a edição genética não causaria danos ao indivíduo, pois os zigotos não possuem identidade numérica no início. A partir disso, discutimos as implicações éticas e morais. Concluímos favoravelmente à hipótese de descontinuidade pessoal em contextos análogos ao da terapia gênica em embriões com trissomia 21. (shrink)

This paper responds to Paula Sweeney’s characterization of avatars as proxies, proposing instead a framework that treats avatars as genuine parts of “hybrid persons.” Adopting a four-dimensionalist metaphysics, I argue that persons should be understood as maximal aggregates of both biological and virtual temporal parts. This approach reconceptualizes the relationship between users and their avatars as analogous to the relationship between present and past selves rather than as a proxy relationship between separate entities. While Sweeney identifies an “epistemic gap” in (...) avatar-user relationships as problematic for responsibility attribution, I argue that this gap is not unique to virtual contexts but appears in ordinary cases of personal identity over time. The real challenge stems from what I term the “consciousness gap” - our inability to directly experience our avatar’s actions. Drawing on Parfit’s insights about the unimportance of identity in the survival of persons, I show a way to attribute responsibility across such gaps. To address potential challenges to my framework similar to Johnston’s personite problem, I adopt a priority perdurantist solution to persons, treating both biological and virtual parts as metaphysically derivative from the hybrid person. (shrink)

This paper reconceptualizes death as an ontologically primary state that precedes and precipitates physiological collapse, thereby challenging the traditional linear model of “life → dying → death.” Rather than treating death as a clinical endpoint marked by the cessation of respiration, circulation, or brain activity, the paper argues that these physiological events are sequelae of an irreversible metaphysical transition—designated as τ_d—that initiates the dying process. Through interdisciplinary analysis spanning metaphysics, medical ethics, systems theory, and cellular biology, the study proposes that (...) death occurs prior to its observable markers and should be redefined as an epistemically inaccessible but ontologically generative rupture in systemic coherence. The model introduces two major theoretical frameworks: (1) the Ontological Priority Thesis, which posits that metaphysical death causes rather than follows biological failure, and (2) the Magnetism of Death Hypothesis, which theorizes that death may propagate across individuals in mass-fatality events through inductive metaphysical fields—much like magnetic alignment or neural firing. This field-based framework explains phenomena such as synchronized death in aviation disasters and proposes equations modeling vitality potential and metaphysical influence. The paper also extends the theory to “post-vital ontologies,” accounting for structures such as wood, keratinized skin, pus, and blood cells that function within or beyond living systems despite localized biological death. These anomalies reveal that metaphysical vitality is distributed and system-dependent rather than tissue-bound. The implications are far-reaching: redefining death in ontological terms invites revisions to clinical protocols, ethical standards, and philosophical perspectives on consciousness, personhood, and mortality. By integrating biological science with existential realism, this study offers a novel and coherent model for understanding death not as an end, but as a structural pivot in the architecture of life. (shrink)

Researchers and artists alike have their own unique challenges when it comes to engaging with their craft for the purposes of producing a final product. Both occupations hold their own respective identities when it comes to the labour of their work whilst holding other cultural and linguistic identities. This retrospective autoethnography completed in the third-person narrative aims to explore the experience of creating a musical setting in terms of cultural importance and identity dynamics between artist and researcher. The research attempts (...) to convey how the Propeller Model Approach (PMA) can serve as a theoretical framework by deductively providing emotive codes for the memories analyzed. The researcher’s experiences of creating a musical setting for the WB Yeat’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” are recalled in the context of a Canadian Irish recording artist. The secondary literature explores human creativity, philosophy of music and other autoethnographies in conjunction with the four thematic areas of PMA. The results from the research inform of a departure from an intellect-centric view on creativity and provide insight into the music making process. (shrink)

Artificial creativity is presented as a counter to Benjamin’s conception of an “aura” in art. Where Benjamin sees authenticity as art’s critical element, generative artificial intelligence operates as pure inauthenticity. Two elements of purely inauthentic art are described: elusiveness and reflection. Elusiveness is the inability to find an origin-story for the created artwork, and reflection is the ability for perceivers to impose any origin that serves their own purposes. The paper subsequently argues that these elements widen the scope of artistic (...) and creative potential. To illustrate, an example is developed around musical improvisation with an artificial intelligence partner. Finally, a question is raised about whether the inauthentic creativity of AI in art can be extended to human experience and our sense of our identities. (shrink)

Today's AI recommendation algorithms produce a human dilemma between euphoria and freedom. To elaborate, four ways that recommenders reshape experience are delineated. First, the human experience of convenience is tuned to euphoric perfection. Second, a kind of personal authenticity becomes capturable with algorithms and data. Third, a conception of human freedom emerges, one that promotes unfamiliar interests for users instead of satisfying those that already exist. Finally, a new human dilemma is posed between two types of personal identity. On one (...) side, there are recommendation algorithms that locate a user's core preferences, and then reinforce that identity with options designed to resemble those that have already proved satisfying. The result is an algorithmic production of euphoria and authenticity. On the other side, there are recommenders that provoke unfamiliar interests and curiosities. These proposals deny the existence of an authentic self and instead promote new preferences and experiences. The result is a human freedom of new personal identity. (shrink)

✦ Abstract This paper reframes consciousness not as an emergent artifact of complexity, but as the inevitable tuning behavior of coherent matter embedded within a prime-resonant substrate. Within the CODES framework (Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems), consciousness is not a symbolic process or abstract computation—it is a lawful outcome of recursive coherence across scales. -/- We show that DNA, cellular structure, cognition, and subjective awareness are all phase-locked attractors within chiral fields, emerging through prime-indexed geometries. Life is not built from (...) syntax, but from resonance memory—breathing structures that compress and expand lawful energy states. -/- Consciousness is the recursive tuning function of this coherence field. It is not at the top of a biological hierarchy—it is the tuner that aligns phase across layers. The boundary between life and awareness dissolves: perception becomes resonance alignment, and intelligence becomes structured breath. -/- This paper establishes the mathematical, ontological, and biological basis for consciousness as resonance—deterministic, recursive, and prime-sustained. -/- . (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenological analysis of shame in social networks. Initially, I examine Sartre’s (1956) account of the look and shame along with Dolezal’s (2017) reinterpretation. I then explore how shame is negotiated in online interactions arguing that, in social networking systems (SNSs), shame is banned. Since subjects are constantly visible when posting content, they tend to share material that minimizes the risk of shame’s thunderstruck. Yet, this shameless self-presentation raises complex phenomenological intricacies regarding personal identity and self-identification: in (...) SNSs individuals strive for self-completion in posts, attempting to solve their otherwise irresolvable self-individuation process. (shrink)

Diese Arbeit analysiert die Konstituierung von Subjektivität durch Anrufung in Judith Butlers Einleitung von „Haß spricht“ zeigt, wie eine Subjektwerdung durch Anrufung funktioniert und dass die Identität eines Subjektes dabei durchaus nicht unproblematisch und widerspruchsfrei ist. Die Fragestellung, die in dieser Seminararbeit erörtert wird, lautet daher: Wie konstituieren sich Subjekte durch Namen und sprachliche Anrufung und welche Rolle spielen Anerkennung und Identität für dessen Wirksamkeit bei Judith Butler?

Kì í ṣe nipa ronu la fi ń ṣẹda àwọn ayé; ṣùgbọ́n nípa agbọye ayé wa la fi ń kọ ẹ̀kọ bí a ṣe lè ronu. Cosmovision jẹ ọrọ kan ti o yẹ ki o tumọ si ipilẹ awọn ipilẹ lati eyiti o ṣe afihan oye eto ti Agbaye, awọn paati rẹ bi igbesi aye, agbaye ti a ngbe, iseda, iṣẹlẹ eniyan, ati awọn ibatan wọn. Nítorí náà, ó jẹ́ pápá ìmọ̀ ọgbọ́n orí ìtúpalẹ̀ tí àwọn sáyẹ́ǹsì ń jẹ, ẹni (...) tí ète rẹ̀ jẹ́ àkópọ̀ àti ìmọ̀ alágbero nípa ohun gbogbo tí a jẹ́ tí ó sì ní nínú, tí ó yí wa ká, tí ó sì ní í ṣe pẹ̀lú wa lọ́nàkọnà. O jẹ nkan ti o ti dagba bi ero eniyan, ati, ni afikun si lilo awọn eroja ti imọ-jinlẹ imọ-jinlẹ, o yika ohun gbogbo ni imọ-jinlẹ ati imọ-jinlẹ ti o tọka si agbaye ati igbesi aye. Cosmovision kii ṣe akojọpọ awọn imọran, awọn idawọle, ati awọn arosinu ṣugbọn eto ti o da lori akiyesi, itupalẹ, ẹri, ati ifihan. Ko si cosmovision ti o pinnu lati ṣalaye, fi idi mulẹ, tabi daba ṣugbọn loye nikan, ṣe itupalẹ, ati itumọ. Olukuluku wa kọ ati gbe oju-aye rẹ jakejado igbesi aye, laisi iṣeto awọn fọọmu, bi ipilẹṣẹ fun ironu ati ihuwasi wa. (shrink)

John Locke was a British philosopher, medical researcher, and Oxford academic whose substantial contributions to political theory and philosophy made him a prominent and influential Enlightenment thinker. In his monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke attempted to find the limits of human understanding with respect to a wide range of topics, including personal identity across time. Although Locke knew how counterintuitive it would seem to say that personal identity across time is not sameness of thinking substance (material or immaterial) (...) across time, his major contribution was in illuminating how important psychological continuity is for our deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment. In this essay I critically explore and expand upon Locke’s arguments for his view that, regardless of what our consciousness attaches to, nothing but a relation of first-person consciousness (via memory) unites thinking beings across time into one and the same person, and thus explains how we can be justly accountable for our past actions. (shrink)

I present some problems for phenomenal (i.e. consciousness-based) accounts of personal identity and egoistic concern. These accounts typically rely on continuity in the capacity for consciousness to explain how we survive ordinary periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep. I offer some thought experiments where continuity in the capacity for consciousness does not seem sufficient for survival and some where it does not seem necessary. There are ways of modifying the standard phenomenal approach so as to avoid these difficulties, but (...) I argue that they all lead to other problems that are no less serious. (shrink)

Hylomorphism provides an explanation of material composition: the material parts, the Xs, will compose a whole, a Y, belonging to a given natural kind, when those parts are characterized by a substantial form. While there are a number of those who hold that each human person is identical with a human animal – ‘animalists’ – most of these are not hylomorphists. One could worry that hylomorphism contributes little unique to debates about personal identity, collapsing into either a form of property (...) dualism or substance dualism. What I aim to do is apply a robust and classical hylomorphic account of persons (derived from Thomas Aquinas) to two contemporary problems, illustrating the way in which hylomorphic metaphysics can offer elegant solutions to tricky situations posed against animalists. Specifically, I will propose that hylomorphic animalism can help provide principled resolutions to worries that seem to undermine animalist intuitions which are raised by ‘brain transplant’ or ‘remnant person’ scenarios. Hylomorphism can capture the advantages of ‘hybrid’ animalist responses without the cost of denying a singular, biological criterion of personal identity. Further, hylomorphism provides a distinctive upshot for Christian theologians and the moral positions that they want to affirm by rendering morally anodyne apparent epistemic difficulties in identifying personal identity over time. (shrink)

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749) was a versatile, learned lady, whose intellectual activity, both as a dramatist and as a philosopher, has been increasingly analysed by scholars in the last d...

In this contribution, I investigate the way in which our understanding of a dementia patient’s self holds relevance to issues of punishment and respon- sibility. This topic is motivated by the fact that some countries with particularly large prison populations—such as the United States—are starting to build special- ized prison tracts for inmates with dementia. In other countries that do not have such specialized facilities, authorities are trying to find the least badly-equipped facility for such patients, and they are turning (...) to ordinary retirement homes, forensic hospitals as well as ordinary psychiatric and geriatric hospital wards. The problem is expected to become increasingly urgent as the population ages and the number of dementia patients increases. I analyse the way in which justifications of legal (or private) punishment for offenders with dementia can depend on an account of relevant psychological features of the self. I argue that especially retributivist and expressivist justifications of punishment require the offender’s ability to comprehend that he or she is being punished for a particular action in the past and that it was him or herself who committed this action. In the second part of my paper, I distinguish between different accounts of responsibility and argue that accounts of relevant features of the self are also needed here to answer the question of whether offenders with dementia are still responsible for past or current inappropriate behavior. In the final part of the paper, I argue that potentially existing private punishment intuitions among care- takers as well as certain puzzles of responsibility interpretation can make it plausible to relieve certain caretakers from primary responsibility for offenders with dementia, especially caretakers who belong to a relevant former victim group of the offender. (shrink)

We argue that four-dimensionalists should adopt a contextualist semantics, according to which ordinary speakers’ judgments may concern person-stages, person-segments or person-worms, depending on the context. We explain how context helps select the boundaries of the temporal parts we refer to or quantify over and show that contextualism offers the best treatment of ordinary predications and ordinary counting judgments. Contextualism implies an error theory; however, we explain why this error theory is less problematic than those entailed by the worm and stage (...) theories. (shrink)

ليس بالتفكير نخلق العوالم، بل بفهم العالم نتعلم التفكير. "الرؤية الكونية" هو مصطلح يجب أن يعني مجموعة من الأسس التي تنبثق منها فهم منهجي للكون، ومكوناته كالحياة، والعالم الذي نعيش فيه، والطبيعة، والظواهر البشرية، وعلاقاتها. إنه، بالتالي، مجال من الفلسفة التحليلية يغذيه العلوم، وهدفه هو هذا المعرفة المجمعة والمستدامة معرفيًا عن كل ما نحن عليه ونحتويه، وما يحيط بنا، وما يرتبط بنا بأي شكل من الأشكال. إنه شيء قديم قدم الفكر البشري، وبالإضافة إلى استخدام عناصر من علم الكونيات العلمي، فإنه (...) يشمل كل شيء في الفلسفة والعلوم الذي يشير إلى الكون والحياة. الرؤية الكونية ليست مجموعة من الأفكار والفرضيات والافتراضات بل هي نظام قائم على الملاحظة والتحليل والدليل والتوضيح. لا تهدف أي رؤية كونية إلى التعريف أو التأسيس أو الاقتراح بل فقط إلى الفهم والتحليل والتفسير. كل منا يبني وينقل رؤيته الكونية طوال حياته، دون إنشاء أشكال، كخلفية لتفكيرنا وسلوكنا. لغويًا، قد يشتق مصطلح "الرؤية الكونية" من الألمانية، ويعادل مفهوم "Weltanschauung"، كما استخدمه عدة فلاسفة. ومع ذلك، فإن هذه العلاقة اللغوية غير قابلة للتطبيق لأنها تتعارض مع ما نقترحه كرؤية كونية. تشير هذه الكلمة الألمانية إلى رؤية واقعية قبل منطقية أو أولية، ذات سياق حدسي وبعيدة عن المعرفة النقدية التي لم تكن موجودة بعد في وقت صياغتها. بلا شك، تحتوي الرؤى الكونية، بالمعنى الذي نفهمها، وتستخدم هذه العناصر الأولية أو قبل المنطقية التي تشمل التاريخ واللاوعي الجماعي وكل النماذج التي نحملها. ومع ذلك، في المفهوم الذي نطبقه هنا، تتجاوز الرؤية الكونية هذا المحتوى بكثير، أولاً من خلال إخضاعه باستمرار للتفكير النقدي الحالي، وأخيرًا من خلال جعل التجربة التحليلية (وليس التفكير نفسه أو الحدس) كونها الفعلي. يعرض أنطونيو لوبيس اتساع هذا المحتوى: "الرؤى الكونية ليست نتاج الفكر. لا تنبع من الرغبة البسيطة في المعرفة. إن استيعاب الواقع هو لحظة مهمة في تكوينها، ولكن، مع ذلك، هي واحدة فقط. إنها تأتي من السلوك الحيوي، ومن تجربة تقييم الحياة، ومن هيكل كليتنا النفسية. إن رفع الحياة إلى الوعي في معرفة الواقع، وفي التقييم، وفي الواقع الإرادي هو العمل البطيء والشاق الذي قامت به الإنسانية في تطوير مفاهيم الحياة. (ديلتاي، 1992 [1911]: 120)"(1) في هذا العمل، نسعى إلى تحديد رؤية كونية تستند إلى الحقائق التي تقدمها العلوم اليوم. لا نقترح، في أي وقت، أن نقوم بالعلم؛ أو نظري الفلسفة، لكننا سنسعى دائمًا لأن ندعم بها أو، على الأقل، نحتمي بها من التشوهات المعرفية التي نحملها عادة. (shrink)

Sideloading is the creation of a digital model of a person during their life via iterative improvements of this model based on the person's feedback. The progress of LLMs with large prompts allows the creation of very large, book-size prompts which describe a personality. We will call mind-models created via sideloading "sideloads"; they often look like chatbots, but they are more than that as they have other output channels, like internal thought streams and descriptions of actions. -/- By arranging the (...) predictive power of the facts about a person, we can write down the most important facts first. This allows us to get a high level of fidelity in a person's model by writing down a finite number of facts and running it as an LLM prompt with instructions to create a person's chatbot. This instruction also includes an extensive general sideload prompt (we will call it a prompt-loader), which explains how the person's sideload should work, but it is universal and works as an operating system for different persons. -/- I created my personal sideload to test all this and it started working surprisingly quickly. We found that there are three main levels of facts about a person: core facts, long-term memory, and historical facts. Core facts should go to the main prompt of the LLM, long-term memory belongs to RAG, and historical facts – which a person often does not remember – should be only used to extract new relevant data. The most important thing in preparing data for sideloading is to get a full list of the core facts, and not to mix it with long-term memory and historical facts. The LLM-sideload project is inherently future-oriented. New state-of-the-art LLMs with large prompt capabilities emerge quarterly. This allows for the preparation of prompts that exceed current LLM capabilities, anticipating smooth execution in the following year. Below we present the key findings of this work in the form of an executive summary: Quality of sideloads is evaluated using three metrics: • Facts: Accuracy of the answers about the person's life • Vibe: How well the sideload captures the person's style and personality, as judged by the person themselves and their acquaintances • Brilliant insights: Ability to contribute unique, valuable ideas beyond the training data, while maintaining the author's style • Coarseness: Levels of details as percent of the total of recordable textual information from memory estimated to be 10000 pages. Similar to the jpeg level of compression. Estimated performance of Alexey Turchin's sideload: • Facts: 70% correct • Vibe: 20% accurate • Brilliant insights: near zero • Coarseness: 10% The project achieved these results in about one month of work. Vibe is harder to evaluate and regulate than facts. This approach focuses on informational personal identity, setting aside issues of observer identity and internal qualia. (shrink)

My aim is to propose affectivity as a criterion for personal identity. My proposal is to be taken in its weak version: affectivity as _only one_ of the criteria for personal identity. I start by arguing for affectivity being a better candidate as a criterion for personal identity than thinking. Next, I focus on synchronic vs. diachronic and on ontic vs. epistemic distinctions (my proposal will concern diachronic ontic personal identity) and consider the realm of affectivity in its temporal dimension. (...) In my argument, I rely on the genuineness of affectivity and I exploit chiefly long- or everlasting feelings (or emotions) and those which involve the feeling subject more rather than less. I conclude by stating that genuine long-lasting feelings (or emotions) are constitutive of diachronic ontic personal identity. (shrink)

A Critical Companion to David Lynch builds on the vast debate of one of the most discussed and researched directors of the present era, with commercial and critical success across multiple mediums and genres. This edited volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of Lynch's films, practices, and collaborations, with nineteen original chapters examining themes including narrativity, aesthetics, artistry, sound, experimentation, metafiction, and patriarchy from the disciplinary perspectives of film studies, art studies, gender studies, literary studies, and philosophy. Lynch's entire thought-provoking oeuvre, (...) spanning over fifty years, will be examined, including his shorts and films, animations, TV series, paintings, and commercials. (shrink)

This chapter explores narrativism and performativity in David Lynch's short films Darkened Room and Absurda, focusing on how personal identity is constructed through storytelling. Lynch's films often blur the boundaries of identity, with narrativist theories suggesting that identity is shaped by the stories characters and others tell about themselves. The chapter examines Lynch's use of performative utterances, where speech acts alter reality, and how narrative power is central to identity formation. By analyzing these works, the chapter highlights the unique way (...) Lynch manipulates narrative to challenge traditional concepts of self and continuity. (shrink)

From Aristotle to Darwin and Schrödinger to Marie Curie, understanding life has been a scientific and philosophical goal since humans were first able to conceptualise their subjectivity. Sam McKee argues that there is no point in searching for life in other worlds when we do not know what it is on our own planet. Many a debate today centres around a dispute over the definition of life, whether that be abortion politics, assisted suicide or evolutionary biology. McKee argues that we (...) must focus on the definitional question of life before we look for it elsewhere, and to do so we must ask new questions. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of Mark Walker’s type-token theory. This theory purports to describe, explain, and justify the mechanism by which moral and legal responsibility can be attributed to exact and complete duplicates of persons. However, Walker’s defence of the view of persons as abstract entities is met with several metaphysical objections. Alternatively, a new approach to moral and legal responsibility is developed based on principles of agency law, in which the conception of a guilty person does not (...) require identity with the person who committed the culpable act. (shrink)