In an independent study last year, a student asked that we work on personal identity, and that we read work by women. I thought that was a good idea; philosophy, as is well known, is the most male-heavy of the humanities, and that can cause writings by women to get overlooked, especially women working outside of feminism.
So here’s a list of some of the more interesting work we read, in case anyone’s interested. Notably this is NOT meant to be an exhaustive list on the topic, or even a reasonable overview! It’s just a selection of the best works we read during the course of the prior semester. I excluded a lot of stuff from our readings that I just didn’t think was that great, and we only had time to cover so much material. I’m working now on a general bibliography on the topic, and hope to put that up at a later date.
There are a lot of pieces by Marya Schechtman here, partly because she’s very good, and partly because, among the leading discussants of personal identity in contemporary philosophy, she is one of the few women. I’ve put a star next to works I think are particularly valuable or interesting, or which add significantly to the topic.
Finally, I’ll note that focusing the reading on women’s writing was not just an exercise in equality; good ideas that were not prominent or were largely absent in the leading male thinkers on the topic were well represented here (for example, the ways in which personhood and identity are limited by social forces and can be externally determined are much better covered here than in the mainstream writings by men), and of course, any exploration of this kind calls for as many good perspectives as possible.
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*Simone de Beauvoir, “Introduction to The Second Sex.” Probably everyone has already read this, but applying it to personhood and identity studies is extremely helpful. Goes very well with the Joanna Russ piece below.
*Marilyn Friedman, “Autonomy and the Split-Level Self” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spring 1986, 24, p.31 I can’t recommend this piece enough. It’s a wonderful response to Frankfurt’s “Concept of the Person” and adds an important emotional component to personhood while also complexifying the Frankfurtian notion of first- and second-order desires.
* Carol Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of the Self in Relationship” in Reconstructing Individualism ed. Heller, Sosna, Wellbery, Davidson, Swidler and Watt, Stanford Univ. Press, 1986 I’ll note that this piece has received a lot of strong criticism in the years since it’s release, and much of that criticism is very helpful. It is nonetheless an essential piece in the history of thought on ethical topics, and I think it’s a great piece for reading in relation to questions of identity and personhood, in that it helps establish the normalcy of forms of identity that are socially situated, as opposed to the traditional view that the self or person is self-contained.
Christine Korsgaard, “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency,” in Personal Identity, ed. Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Blackwell, 2003 I find myself in pretty strong disagreement with Korsgaard, who takes a strong body-criteria approach, but Korsgaard is a great philosopher and always worth reading, and her approach is nicely complex in the way it focuses on agency and time.
Kristen Renwick Monroe, “Morality and the Sense of Self,’ American Journal of Political Science, vol 45, no. 3, July 2001, pp. 491-507
*Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation,” Psychological Review, vol 98, no 2, 1991, pp 224-253 Interesting attempt at cross-cultural study of the concept of selfhood and identity. It’s a sketchy overview, and it’s hard to be sure if the conclusions drawn are well-supported by the evidence, but there’s some extremely thought provoking models in here.
*Amelie Rorty: Introduction to The Identities of Persons, University of California Press, 1984
*Joanna Russ, “What Can A Heroine Do, or Why Women Can’t Write” in Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillion, Bowling Green Univ. 1973 Great, sadly under-read piece about how forms of life and identity are limited when stories are limited. Excellent for narrativist theories of selfhood, and really well written.
*Marya Schechtman: “Empathic Access: The Missing Ingredient in Personal Identity” In Personal Identity, ed. Martin and Barresi, Blackwell, 2007 While I have strong criticisms of this piece, it’s absolutely groundbreaking and essential for future studies of personal identity.
*Marya Schechtman, “Self Expression and Self Control” in The Self? ed. Galen Strawson, Blackwell, 2005
Marya Schechtman, “Stories, Lives and Basic Survival”
Marya Schechtman, “Diversity in Unity”
Marya Schectman, “Personality and Persistence”
Marya Schechtman, “Memory and Identity,” Philosophical Studies 153:65-79, 2011
Marya Schechtman, “Personhood and the Practical,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 31:271-283, 2010 This piece is a little sketchy and some of the arguments highly unsatisfying but it points the way to a radically new conception of personhood based on the idea of “person-space,” that is, the area we reserve for certain entites in our social practice that admits them to a socially-sanctioned realm of personhood.
Popular Metaphysics 