Marya Schechtman, “Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life” (Oxford UP, 2014)
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What is the central question about personal identity that the episode explores?
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Maria Schechtman, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her new book, Staying Alive, Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life, is just out from Oxford University Press. What is it to be the same person over time?
The 17th century British philosopher John Locke approached this question from a forensic standpoint. Persons are identified over time with an appropriately related series of psychological states, in particular, a chain of memories. And our interest in identifying persons in this way stems from our interest in holding people responsible now for what they did in the past. Locke's psychological account of persons remains highly influential today, while the rooting of that account in practical concerns, rather than, say, broader metaphysical positions, is somewhat more contentious. In her new book, Maria Schechtman builds on Locke's idea of a forensic unit, to provide a new account in which a much wider range of practical concerns, including the many different ways in which we treat others in everyday interactions, are constitutive of being a person.
Sheckman articulates her view in relation to prominent contemporary views, and in particular, Eric Olson's influential animalist account, in which human persons just are human bodies. Let's turn to the interviewer. Hello, Maria Sheckman, are you there? Yes, I am. Hello, Carrie. Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank
you. Thank you so much for asking me to be here.
Well, I'm looking forward to our conversation about your new book, Staying Alive, Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life. And we'd like to start with a little bit of background about the people that we are talking with. So maybe you can give us a little background on yourself and on how you came to write the book.
Sure. So... I am Chicago born and raised. I've lived here almost all of my life. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago where I studied philosophy. I went to graduate school at Harvard, and then I came back to Chicago to take a job at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
How does Marya Schechtman describe her academic background and what led her to write *Staying Alive*?
And I have been here ever since, so I'm very geographically stable. I've always been interested in the topic of personal identity, which is the topic of this book. I think even before I decided I was going to study philosophy, I knew that that was a thing I was interested in. And one of the things that drew me to philosophy was that it gave me so many tools for studying questions like that. And this book, there were actually a few incidents that led specifically to this project in the context of the work I had been doing. Up until the time I started working on this book, I had been working on developing a sort of alternative to the typical way of understanding Lockean accounts of personal identity.
So when I was in graduate school, Reasons and Persons came out, Parfit's book. It was a big deal. It was very influential. But I had some disagreements. I felt somehow what I found attractive in Locke wasn't captured there. And I really liked the Lockean account. So I tried to develop an alternative to the psychological continuity theory, and I developed a narrative view, and I worked on that for a very long time, trying to fine-tune it and in different ways develop and defend it. But then two things happened that made me start to question the whole Lockean picture of personal identity, at least as a metaphysical account of personal identity, and the two were interconnected. One was that I had the opportunity to be on a panel at the Berman Institute, which was really wonderful, in which philosophers of personal identity interacted with clinicians in neurology talking about how they would view questions of personal identity in various officialized case studies.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the central question about personal identity that the episode explores?
0:01–2:58
2
How does Marya Schechtman describe her academic background and what led her to write *Staying Alive*?
2:58–16:23
3
What is Locke’s forensic account of personal identity and why is it still influential?
16:23–30:25
4
How does Schechtman critique animalism and what are the main points of disagreement with Eric Olson?
30:25–48:03
5
What is the ‘forensic unit’ versus the ‘moral self’ distinction and how does it relate to practical concerns?
48:03–1:04:33
6
How does Schechtman expand the notion of personhood to include social, biological, and practical relationships?
1:04:33–1:08:24
Speakers
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