Marya Schechtman's work centers on the philosophy of personal identity, exploring the profound connections between ethical and metaphysical questions of what makes us who we are. Her research delves into practical reasoning and the philosophy of mind, with a keen interest in existentialism, bioethics, and the intersection of philosophy and technology. Schechtman's approach offers a unique perspective on the nature of selfhood and its intricate formation.
This VSI is a multidisciplinary approach to central questions about the nature and existence of the self. It engages millennia-old questions about the self as well as modern research to produce new perspectives on both academic questions about the self and the more immediate practical, everyday puzzles about the self that concern us all.
Marya Schechtman offers a new theory of personal identity, which captures the importance of being able to reidentify people in our daily lives. She sees persons as loci of practical interaction, and defines the unity of such a locus in terms of biological, psychological, and social functions, mediated through social and cultural infrastructure.
An amnesia victim asking Who am I? means something different from a confused adolescent asking the same question. Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second. The...