Determinări ale continuității în timp a unui subiect uman: construcțiile narative ale identității personale
Requirements for the temporal continuity of a human subject: narrative constructions of personal identity

Summary/Abstract: If an entire tradition of classical philosophy has found many of its resources in the question "Who am I?", contemporary philosophy, especially the one influenced by analytic philosophy, aims, by analogy, at defining individual identity, yet from a different perspective. Thus, answering the question: ”What makes someone the same person over time?” guides, today, the inquiry regarding personal identity. At least two seem to be, today, the critical issues that generate searches of the basis of personal identity: a metaphysical one, entailed by the death anxiety, and a practical other one, which arises from questioning the responsibility for the consequences of one’s own actions. Therefore, in the attempt of explaining the way(s) in which we, as persons, persist over time, within this paper I will first review some theories or perspectives on personal identity which describe the necessary and/or sufficient conditions to ensure that the numerical identity of a being is maintained at different time points throughout her/his life. I will highlight, in a comparative manner, the theories based on psychological continuity, which set up numerical identity on different types of causal dependence of the individuals’ psychic experiences, such as memory and/or psychological connectedness, as well as the animalistic theories, which favour the body as the foundation of the personal identity and of one’s persistence along time. Eventually, I will try to prove that, among these theories, two - namely the narrative theory and the anthropological theory – seem to be able of answering both the older question of classical philosophy and of the more recent one concerning the definition and construction of personal identity.

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