The undetermined I

• Applicant: Dr. Markus Herrmann
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320162201

The discussion about personal identity has lost a lot of momentum during the last years compared to earlier decades. Although most of the published texts regarding personal identity aim at deepening further the discussions about specific aspects or giving a survey of the entire topic, there has been no major twist in the discussion of the recent years. One yet quite old position of the discussion is called anticriterialism. According to it, the question of personal identity cannot be decided by objective criteria. However, anticriterialism is an underdog position in the discussion. Beside the fact that it is considered to be a poorly developed, several objections are raised against it: It rests upon a vague foundation, confuses synchronic phenomena with transtemporal ones, does no justice to our fallibility concerning identity ascriptions, makes a category mistake, and is a mystic theory in the end.The aim of this research project is to revive the discussion about personal identity: A new position is to be developed which could be described best as moderately anticriterial, but which does not fit in familiar categories. It is antireductionist, but monist. It is realist, but concerning the question of the criterion of transtemporal personal identity it is not committed to purely objective criteria.Considering these aspects, this position is probably comparatively close to our every day intuition about personal identity, but its argument is precisely not based on our intuition or on thought experiments, at least not on those about personal identity. Rather it takes its origin from thoughts of P. F. Strawson on reference in cases of symmetry. This starting point makes it possible to deflect the objections against anticriterialism that have been mentioned above.Albeit the argument of this position is not based on the popular thought experiments about questions of transtemporal personal identity, it still aims at being able to describe the popular thought experiments appropriately in the end.The importance of this research project goes far beyond questions of personal identity and makes useful contributions to metaphysics. Beyond personal identity it ranges from the general concept of identity to the much discussed mind body problem.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants