This project, hosted by the Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, develops a new approach to the problem of personal identity, establishing a productive new avenue of investigation for this important and highly contested branch of philosophy. While traditional metaphysics has treated the self as just another object (albeit one of a rather unusual kind), with objective identity and persistence conditions, recent philosophy has begun to appreciate that selfhood has something irreducibly subjective and first-personal about it. Yet it has not yet made the further move of considering the temporal corollary of this “from the inside” character: that questions about personal identity are never asked from an atemporal “nowhen” but always from the present moment. If this is true, then selves are always “tensed” in a way that alters the focus for discussions of the problems of personal identity. Instead of asking about a single entity stretched across time, questions about ‘the self’ now refer to the way this always-present-tense entity interacts – not just cognitively, but emotionally – with events in the past and future.

The project will develop and test a framework for discussing personal identity based on these premises. Once this framework has been articulated it will then be applied to three specific problem areas within the literature on personal identity: the relation of self-interested concern (including our concern for survival) to identity; problem-scenarios in which numerical identity and self-regarding concern seem to come apart; and the object of self-reflexive emotions such as remorse, pride and guilt. In this way, the potential benefits of this new approach for personal identity theory, and directions for further research, will be articulated and assessed.