Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw ends her landmark essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” with a normative claim about coalitions. She suggests that we should reconceptualize identity groups as “in fact coalitions,” or at least as “potential coalitions waiting to be formed.” In this essay, I explore this largely overlooked claim by combining philosophical analysis with archival research I conducted at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society Archive in San Francisco about (...) Somos Hermanas, the solidarity project of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, based in the San Francisco Women’s Building (1984–90). I extend my analysis into the present by drawing on the oral history and published works of Carmen Vázquez, a key organizer in both Somos Hermanas and the Women’s Building. I argue that conceptualizing identities as in fact coalitions—as complex, internally heterogeneous unities constituted by their internal differences and dissonances and by internal as well as external relations of power—enables us to organize effective political coalitions that cross existing identity categories and to pursue a liberatory politics of interconnection. (shrink)

This essay investigates the representation of lesbian, gay and bisexual people during the debate over whether they should serve openly in the United States military. Many studies on this topic have focused on the question of whether this debate ‘militarized’ LGB people. This study takes a broader view, tracking five rhetorical archetypes through two US Congressional Hearings. I identify and track these archetypes using a coding procedure that draws on concepts from Membership Categorization Analysis, rhetorical theory, discourse analysis and elsewhere. (...) The result is a holistic picture of how LGB people were represented across the hearings. While they were increasingly associated with military values in the later hearing, they were also less often represented as victims, spoilers or activists in a negative sense. These findings offer additional insights into how the meanings-in-use of identity categories are changed in discourse. (shrink)

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES about the Mind-Body Identity Theory form a case-study for the investigation of the methods practiced by linguistic philosophers. Recent criticisms of these methods question that philosophers can discern lines of demarcation between "categories" of entities, and thereby diagnose "conceptual confusions" in "reductionist" philosophical theories. Such doubts arise once we see that it is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to draw a firm line between the "conceptual" and the "empirical," and thus to differentiate between a statement embodying (...) a conceptual confusion and one that expresses a surprising empirical result. The proponent of the Identity Theory are identical with certain brain-processes) holds that his opponents' arguments to the effect that empirical inquiry could not identify brain-processes and sensations are admirable illustrations of this difficulty. For, he argues, the classifications of linguistic expressions that are the ground of his opponents' criticism are classifications of a language which is as it is because it is the language spoken at a given stage of empirical inquiry. But the sort of empirical results that would show brain processes and sensations to be identical would also bring about changes in our ways of speaking. These changes would make these classifications out of date. To argue against the Identity Theory on the basis of the way we talk now is like arguing against an assertion that supernatural phenomena are identical with certain natural phenomena on the basis of the way in which superstitious people talk. There is simply no such thing as a method of classifying linguistic expressions that has results guaranteed to remain intact despite the results of future empirical inquiry. Thus in this area there is no method which will have the sort of magisterial neutrality of which linguistic philosophers fondly dream. (shrink)

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into (...) being, whether other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that all-inclusive superordinate categories, such as “citizens of the world” and “humans,” may represent different socio-psychological realities. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of different categories may account for different psychological processes and attitudinal or behavioral outcomes. Two studies extended previous research by comparing how these categories are cognitively represented, and their impact on intergroup helping from host communities toward migrants. In a correlational study, 168 nationals from 25 countries perceived the group of (...) migrants as more prototypical of the superordinate category “citizens of the world” than their national group, whereas no differences in prototypicality occurred for the category “humans.” Identification with “citizens of the world” was positively associated with a disposition to oppose helping migrants and to offer dependency-oriented help. However, identification with “humans” was positively associated with helping in general, and with offering dependency- and autonomy-oriented help; and negatively associated with opposition to helping. The experimental study manipulated the salience of “citizens of the world” vs. “humans” vs. control category, among 224 nationals from 36 countries. Results showed that the salience of “humans” triggered higher entitativity and essentialist perceptions, and dual-identity representations. No differences due to salience were found for representations of relative ingroup prototypicality or helping responses. Overall, these findings suggest that the interchangeable use of different labels is problematic, considering these might activate different representations, and thus, are likely to lead, in some circumstances, to different attitudinal or behavioral outcomes. (shrink)

In public health research, tracking folk racial categories (in disease risk, etc.) is a double-edged tool. On the one hand, tracking folk racial categories is dangerous because it reinforces a problematic but fairly common belief in biological race essentialism. On the other hand, ignoring racial categories also runs the risk of ignoring very real biological phenomena in which marginalized communities, likely in virtue of their marginalization, are sicker and in need of improved resources. Much of the conversation (...) among epidemiologists and philosophers of medicine concerning the issue of tracking folk racial categories in public health research springs forth from largely black/white binarized health inequities. While health inequities between black and white Americans are certainly a very important topic, I am interested in investigating the complications to this conversation about the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research generated by the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US—groups whose health inequities are typically tracked based on the folk racial category of “Native American” or “American Indian,” but whose unique identity categories and community membership problematize the current spectrum of approaches to tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. This paper will draw on scholarship by and about Indigenous people in the US context to address an undertheorized facet of the conversations concerning the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research, including the potential undermining of American Indian sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies. I will end on some methodological considerations inspired by the inclusion of Indigenous identities in the US in the conversation about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. (shrink)

Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories justifies their apriority, i.e. that their contents originate in the understanding itself, while the Transcendental Deduction justifies their objectivity, both in that they purport to represent objects of experience and that they do so successfully. The apriority of the categories, as explained in terms of acts of synthesis required for having sensible intuitions of objects, is justified by establishing their generic identity with logical functions of judgment, i.e. acts of judgment required (...) for referring concepts to objects. The objective purport of the categories is justified by establishing that sensible intuitions fall under them. To finally justify that the categories represent successfully, i.e. that the objects of our intuitions fall under them, it is established that the representations of space and time do, namely by showing that the features addressed in their Metaphysical Expositions, too, are to be explained in terms of acts of synthesis. (shrink)

This paper deals with a foundational aspect of Integrated Information Theory of consciousness: the nature of the relation between the axioms of phenomenology and the postulates of cause-effect power. There has been a lack of clarity in the literature regarding this crucial issue, for which IIT has received much criticism of its axiomatic method and basic tenets. The present contribution elucidates the problem by means of a categorial analysis of the theory’s foundations. Its main results are that: IIT has a (...) set of nine fundamental concepts of reason, called categories, which constitute its categorial lexicon and through which it formulates a system of principles incorporating the axioms, the postulates, and the central identity; and the connection between the axioms and postulates is grounded by their common root in this categorial lexicon, the categories of which find their justification by means of a phenomenological and transcendental deduction. Some further results are the unique origin of axioms and postulates in the categories; the distinction between conceptual and formalized postulates; a clarification of the uniqueness problem of categorial lexica in general; and an IIT account of objectivity by explicating how the physical is defined by means of categories. All of this is put to use against various criticism targeting IIT’s theoretical core. If successful, the proposed interpretation illuminates a central issue in the contemporary study of consciousness and contributes to an environment of mutual understanding between defenders and critics of the theory. (shrink)

Generally, ontological categories are understood to express the most general features of reality; however, obtaining a complete category list is difficult. This volume examines how Aquinas establishes the list of categories through a technique of identifying diversity—in how predicates are related to their subjects. A sophisticated critique by Scotus is also examined—a rejection which is fundamentally grounded in the idea that no real distinction can be made from a logical one. It is argued Aquinas's approach can be rehabilitated (...) in that real distinctions are possible when specifically considering modes of predication. This discussion between Aquinas and Scotus bears fruit in a contemporary context insofar as it bears upon, strengthens, and seeks to correct Lowe's four-category ontology view regarding the identity and relation of the categories. (shrink)

Abstract:Paul Williams critiques Śāntideva's argument, claiming it rests on a category mistake. I suggest that if Williams' critique were sound, then the debate about composition as identity in recent analytic metaphysics would also be nonsensical. My argument is that Williams' objection does not make sense when dealing with absolutely general concepts such as the concepts of identity and parthood.

0. The ancient and honorable role of philosophy as a servant to the learning, development and use of scientific knowledge, though sadly underdeveloped since Grassmann, has been re-emerging from within the particular science of mathematics due to the latter's internal need; making this relationship more explicit (as well as further investigating the reasons for the decline) will, it is hoped, help to germinate the seeds of a brighter future for philosophy as well as help to guide the much wider learning (...) of mathematics and hence of all the sciences. 1. The unity of interacting opposites "space vs. quantity", with the accompanying "general vs. particular" and the resulting division of variable quantity into the interacting opposites "extensive vs. intensive", is susceptible, with the aid of categories, functors, and natural transformations, of a formulation which is on the one hand precise enough to admit proved theorems and considerable technical development and yet is on the other hand general enough to admit incorporation of almost any specialized hypothesis. Readers armed with the mathematical definitions of basic category theory should be able to translate the discussion in this section into symbols and diagrams for calculations. 2. The role of space as an arena for quantitative "becoming" underlies the qualitative transformation of a spatial category into a homotopy category, on which extensive and intensive quantities reappear as homology and cohomology. 3. The understanding of an object in a spatial category can be approached through definite Moore-Postnikov levels; each of these levels constitutes a mathematically precise "unity and identity of opposites", and their ensemble bears features strongly reminiscent of Hegel's Science of Logic. This resemblance suggests many mathematical and philosophical problems which now seem susceptible of exact solution. (shrink)

In social psychology, we need to establish a general theory of the self, which can attend to both macro and micro processes, and which avoids the redundancies of separate theories on different aspects of the self. For this purpose, we present core components of identity theory and social identity theory and argue that although differences exist between the two theories, they are more differences in emphasis than in kind, and that linking the two theories can establish a more (...) fully integrated view of the self. The core components we examine include the different bases of identity (category/group or role) in each of the theories, identity salience and the activation of identities as discussed in the theories, and the cognitive and motivational processes that emerge from identities based on category/group and on role. By examining the self through the lens of both identity theory and social identity theory, we see how, in combination, they can move us toward a general theory of the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social (...) identity. The ways in which metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way diverge in character from metalinguistic negotiations are described, as are several consequences of the existence of metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way. (shrink)

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by idetifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency between entities of different categories. He proceeds to set out a unified and original metaphysical system: he defends a substance ontology, according to which the existence of the (...) world s one world in time depends upon the existence of persisting things which retain their identity over time and through processes of qualitative change. And he contends that even necessary beings, such as the abstract objects of mathematics, depend ultimately for their existence upon there being a concrete world of enduring substances. Within his system of metaphysics Lowe seeks to answer many of the deepest and most challenging questions in philosophy. (shrink)

Some thirty years ago, two proposals were made concerning criteria for identity of proofs. Prawitz proposed to analyze identity of proofs in terms of the equivalence relation based on reduction to normal form in natural deduction. Lambek worked on a normalization proposal analogous to Prawitz's, based on reduction to cut-free form in sequent systems, but he also suggested understanding identity of proofs in terms of an equivalence relation based on generality, two derivations having the same generality if (...) after generalizing maximally the rules involved in them they yield the same premises and conclusions up to a renaming of variables. These two proposals proved to be extensionally equivalent only for limited fragments of logic. The normalization proposal stands behind very successful applications of the typed lambda calculus and of category theory in the proof theory of intuitionistic logic. In classical logic, however, it did not fare well. The generality proposal was rather neglected in logic, though related matters were much studied in pure category theory in connection with coherence problems, and there are also links to low-dimensional topology and linear algebra. This proposal seems more promising than the other one for the general proof theory of classical logic. (shrink)

The project of Categories We Live By is to offer a metaphysics of social categories. The strategy is to give a theory of social properties of individuals. The main components of the theory are a conferralist framework for properties; an account of social meaning; and an account of social construction; accompanying is also an account of social identity. This theory can be applies to offer concrete conferralist proposals of categories such as sex, gender, race, disability, religion, (...) and LGBTQ categories. This précis describes the main components (conferralist framework, social meaning, social construction, social identity) briefly, but leaves discussions of applications for another time. (shrink)

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic (...) structures and systems; identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions. (shrink)

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question, "who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor.

This anthology provides the definitive theoretical sources of contemporary thinking about identity, including explorations of race, class, gender, and nationality. Explores the long and rich tradition of philosophical analysis and debate over the genesis, contours, and political effects of identity categories. Provides the definitive theoretical sources and contemporary debates by leading theorists such as selections from Hegel, Marx, Freud, DuBois, Beauvoir, Lukács, Fanon, Hall, Guha, Hobsbawm, Wittig, Butler, Halperin, R. Robertson, Said, and LaClau. Combines general and specific (...) analyses of particular identity categories: race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, nationality. Allows for a comparative study of identities through multiple theoretical frameworks. (shrink)

We conducted three studies aimed at showing that one-to-one translations between emotion terms might be comparing independent or barely overlapping categories of emotional experience. In Study 1 we found that the speakers' most accessible features of two supposedly equivalent emotions terms (shame and vergüenza) were very different. In Study 2, American and Spanish speakers' typicality ratings of 25 out of 29 constitutive features of “shame” or “vergüenza” were significantly different. In Study 3, these important differences in the content and (...) internal structure of “shame” and “vergüenza” were also reflected in the affective meaning of their corresponding terms. We conclude that “shame” and “vergüenza” do not share the same cluster of central features, and cannot be treated as identical categories of emotional experience. This finding raises serious questions about the one-to-one translation practices not only of most cross-cultural studies on “shame”, but also of other emotion concepts. We suggest an alternative method of translation based on Diachronic Prototype Semantics (Geeraerts, 1997). (shrink)

In this study caring is shown to be a membershipbound activity to kin and gender categories with strong moral connotations. Being a daughter or being a son are good enough reasons for becoming a caregiver, more so for women than for men. Caregivers were interviewed within the research project The role of women in family care of disabled elderly conducted by the Social and Economic Research Department of INRCA, Ancona, Italy. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed through a detailed (...) discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. Interview data are treated as interactional encounters that occasion members to display relevant aspects of their identities and morally adequate images of being a caregiver. In the interview interaction, interlocutors display an orientation towards the production of a moral order in which duty and responsibilities are allocated on the basis of gender distinction. Males are generally described as not being responsible for caring tasks, except for situations in which females are absent or sick, that is, for serious reasons. Caregivers'' perception of time dedicated to caring is pervasive. Most caregivers said it occupied all their time, but gender differences were noticeable. Caring tasks are recognized as gender specific practices, thus failing to carry out these tasks is morally sanctionable when women are involved, but not so for men. Many caregivers described caring for older relatives as an intense source of stress, involving serious physical and psychological problems. The study on moral and identity issues related to caregiving highlights endangering constructions of caring. (shrink)

Of the plural dimensions of collective identity, this paper explores identity as a rhetorical device. The identity tag is a case in point of pragmatic effectiveness. To account for such a power a hypothetical model of identity categories is presented. Its constituent modules shape four basic dimensions: position, deindividuation, exclusion and cognitive shielding. Such delineated narrative identity becomes equivalent to an informal ideology . As constitutive rhetoric , the narrative construction of identities converts self-referential (...) tautology into strategies of discrimination, purification and extermination of exponents of otherness. Last century mass destruction – totalitarianism, colonialism, ethno-nationalism – has been tributary to the identity paradigm. (shrink)

This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter theory embodies on its own (...) an account of the nature of identity through time of things that are in time but not extended in time. The question is whether this view is compatible with the trope bundle account of concrete particulars, and, assuming it is (both theories being separately attractive) whether bringing them together entails any modifications (other than complexity) to either theory. After examining likely metaphysical difficulties the tentative conclusion is that the attractiveness of the trope bundle theory persists despite the marriage, but that the mental picture of what tropes and trope bundles are must be overhauled. (shrink)

When, for example, we say of something that it ‘is an object’, or ‘is an event’, or ‘is a property’, we are engaging in categorial predication: we are assigning something to a certain ontological category. Ontologicalcategorization is clearly a type of classification, but it differs radically from the types of classification that are involved in thetaxonomic practices of empirical sciences, as when a physicist saysof a certain particle that it ‘is an electron’, or when a zoologist saysof a certain animal (...) that it ‘is a mammal’, or when a meteorologist says of a certain weather‐phenomenon that it ‘is a hurricane’. Classifications of the latter types presuppose that the items being classified have already been assigned to appropriate ontologicalcategories, such as the categories of object, species, or event. What do categorial predications mean? How are their truth‐conditions to be determined, and how can those truth‐conditions be known to be satisfied? Do they have truthmakers? Questions like these are amongst those addressed in the present paper. (shrink)

In this article, identity politics is understood as a form of politics stressing collective but malleable group identities as the basis of political action. This notion of identity politics also allows thinking of identity as intersectional. The focus of this article, and a problem related to identity politics, is that when discussed in the context of the neoliberal order, identity politics has a tendency to become harnessed by the ethos of vulnerability. Some implications of the (...) ‘vulnerabilizisation’ are considered in the field of education, which is a field currently thoroughly affected by neoliberalism. Therefore, it is also important to look closer at the relationship between identity politics and the ethos of vulnerability. In addition, we re-consider poststructuralist thinking as a theoretical and political approach to see what it can offer in terms of re-thinking identity politics and in analyzing the ethos of vulnerability. When categories of vulnerability keep expanding into various psycho-emotional vulnerabilities defining subjects that can be known and spoken about, it is crucial to ask whether we regard these changes as educationally and politically progressive. The article discusses some problematic policies in educational environments and the phenomenon of trigger warnings. (shrink)

I have both a smaller and a larger aim. The smaller aim is polemical. Kit Fine believes that a material thing—a Romanesque statue, for example, or an open door—can be distinguished from its constituent matter—a piece of alloy, say, or a hunk of plastic—without recourse to modal or temporal considerations. The statue is Romanesque; the piece of alloy is not Romanesque. The door is open; the hunk of plastic is not open. I argue that these considerations, when combined with a (...) proper understanding of how the use of ‘not’ is functioning, entail that the statue is the piece of alloy, and that the door is the hunk of plastic. Far from challenging the doctrine that a material thing is its matter, Fine’s observations confirm the view. My larger aim is methodological. I will show that natural language semantics can guide inquiry in certain areas of metaphysics by helping us to advance lingering debates. (shrink)

Numerical identity is the non-relational sameness of an object to itself. It is concerned with understanding how entities undergo change and maintain their identity. In substance metaphysics, an entity is considered a substance with an essence and such an essence is the source of its power. However, such a framework fails to explain the sense in which an entity is still the entity it was, amidst changes. Those who claim that essence is unaffected by existence are faced with (...) challenge of exploring the epistemic access to such an essence, which is questionable at best. Process metaphysics is a strong candidate for a theory that can ontologically explain regularity and change without appeal to essence. Process and its interactions is the main category. Every process is an emergent organization of constitutive interactions and is individuated on the basis of its interactive powers, that is, the ways in which it interacts with the world around it. Interactions are situated adaptation to changes. In this way, changes are crucial within process metaphysics and are included in the starting point of its investigation. What seems to the naked eyes as one-ness/singularity is a complex process where an organization of interactions is emerging from moment to moment by continually adapting to the changes around and within it. The question of numerical identity over time becomes valid only within substance metaphysics which has no space to accommodate change, due to its allegiance to essence. (shrink)

The work analyzes the results of a pilot socio-cultural study of the Tuvan diaspora of the city of Abakan, conducted by researchers of the N.F. Katanov Khakass State University. The results of the study describe the social structure of the analyzed ethnic group, the level of interaction between members, the reasons for moving to another national region, as well as the activity of socio-cultural attitudes. In addition, atten­tion is focused on the level of expression of the ethnic identity of (...) representatives of the Tuvan diaspora, which, as a result of the study, is characterized as increased. The author also comes to the conclusion that the ethnic identity of the analyzed group passes into the category of intersubjectivity and is not subjective. (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. (...) -/- However, there are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

What primitive concepts does formal ontology require? Forsaking as too indirect the linguistic way of discerning the categories of being, this paper considers what primitives might be required for representing things in themselves (noumena) and representations of them in a thoroughly crafted large autonomous multi-purpose database. Leaving logical concepts and material ontology aside, the resulting 32 categories in 13 families range from the obvious (identity/difference, existence/non-existence) through the fairly obvious (part/whole, one/many, sequential order) and the surprisingly familiar (...) (illocutionary modes, mass/count, indexical/descriptive) to the controversial (moment/fundament, transparent/opaque) and the arcane (modes of class delimitation, taxonomic rank, aspects of designators). Any such list is speculative and tentative, but the test of this one will be in its implementation, a new departure for philosophical category theories. (shrink)

What primitive concepts does formal ontology require? Forsaking as too indirect the linguistic way of discerning the categories of being, this paper considers what primitives might be required for representing things in themselves (noumena) and representations of them in a thoroughly crafted large autonomous multi-purpose database. Leaving logical concepts and material ontology aside, the resulting 32 categories in 13 families range from the obvious (identity/difference, existence/non-existence) through the fairly obvious (part/whole, one/many, sequential order) and the surprisingly familiar (...) (illocutionary modes, mass/count, indexical/descriptive) to the controversial (moment/fundament, transparent/opaque) and the arcane (modes of class delimitation, taxonomic rank, aspects of designators). Any such list is speculative and tentative, but the test of this one will be in its implementation, a new departure for philosophical category theories. (shrink)

There is a category of objects such that for any two occurrences of an object in that category, Establishing the highest degree of their qualitative identity will not be sufficient to establish that the object involved is one and the same. It is first argued that objects in this category occupy positions in a spatio-Temporal continuum and obey certain principles of conservation. And then two criteria for the numerical identity of these objects are developed: (a) that there are (...) scientific laws which can, In principle, Predict or retrodict a continuous path for the object; (b) that the parts of the object and their arrangement are preserved in a certain specified way. (shrink)

In this essay, I challenge Charles Mills’s use of the category of moral personhood for advancing a robust anti-racist political critique in nonideal circumstances. I argue that the idea of the moral equality of persons is necessary but insufficient for reparative justice. I enrich the normative basis of political critique to include: (1) a clarification of what the public recognition of moral personhood can legitimately entail as a requirement of justice enforceable by the state, especially with respect to economic reforms (...) that advance equal opportunity and (2) a conception of non-alienated labor that assails identity-based occupational segregation in the labor market. These additional components do not exhaust the plausible bases for political critique, but enrich it in a way that the idea of moral equality alone cannot. (shrink)

This paper draws on the cultural-materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicisation of identity and identity-politics in capitalist societies. A keywords analysis reveals surprisingly that identity, as it is elaborated in the familiar categories of personal and social identity, is a relatively novel concept in Western thought, politics and culture. The claim is not the standard one that people’s ‘identities’ became more important and apparent in advanced capitalist societies, but that (...) class='Hi'>identity itself came to operate as a new and key mechanism for construing, shaping and narrating experiences of selfhood and grouphood in this period. From a cultural-materialist perspective, the emergence and evolution of this idea of identity can only be properly understood in relation to the social contexts of its use, namely, the new contexts of consumption of capitalist societies, and the development of new forms of group-based struggle from the 1960s. What the analysis shows is that it was the commercialisation and politicisation of older essentialist understandings of selfhood and grouphood in these contexts that has given rise to the concepts of personal and social identity as we know them today.By exploring the material conditions that have given rise to the contemporary powerful attachment to ‘identity’, this paper offers a new point of departure from which to pursue many issues of concern to critical theorists and radical activists today, including the conflict over identity politics in radical circles, the historical and social processes behind their development and at least partial co-option, and their relation to neoliberal political-economic formations today. (shrink)

The way we perform identity in everyday situations nowadays is affected in very concrete ways by our interactions with technology. However, our conceptual understanding of such exchanges has been limited to a handful of concepts or narrative devices (i.e. acyborg), which have proved their limits when facing extreme complexity. This paper develops a proposal to reexamine various possible assemblages between man and machine – at the level of the self-awareness and self-signifying of an individualvis à vistechnological-based entities – by (...) revisiting Greimas’s semiotic square, a tool from classical structural semiotics that could be readjusted to unfold what is at stake in that relationship, and under the semantic category of identity. The paper explains the constituent terms of Greimas’s elementary structure of meaning, unfolds the logic of his semiotic square, and develops some of its key underlying notions. Moreover, the limitations of the semiotic square are also surveyed. Instead of trying to pose a new paradigm, this paper wants to explore its heuristic possibilities and resist any claims of the underlying theory to produce fix typologies, semantic determinisms or stable discursive forms. In that sense, the scope of this essay is not to identify the whole array of cases in which identity is formed out of the contact between man and his machinicalother, but to deliver a working scheme that may function as an initial, navigational map, a tool by which we can further explore the idea of how identity is affected by technology as a dynamic, performative process, therefore informing a semantic know-how and granting further access to yet unfamiliar fields of a post-human condition. (shrink)

This book is an examination of how the law understands human identity and the whole notion of 'human being'. On these two notions the law, usually unconsciously, builds the superstructure of 'human rights'. It explores how the law understands the concept of a human being, and hence a person who is entitled to human rights. This involves a discussion of the legal treatment of those of so-called "marginal personhood" (e.g. high functioning non-human animals; humans of limited intellectual capacity, and (...) fetuses). It also considers how we understand our identity as people, and hence how we fall into different legal categories: such as gender, religion and so on. The law makes a number of huge assumptions about some fundamental issues of human identity and authenticity - for instance that we can talk meaningfully about the entity that we call 'our self'. Until now it has rarely, if ever, identified those assumptions, let alone interrogated them. This failure has led to the law being philosophically dubious and sometimes demonstrably unfit for purpose. Its failure is increasingly hard to cover up. What should happen legally, for instance, when a disease such as dementia eliminates or radically transforms all the characteristics that most people regard as foundational to the 'self'? This book seeks to plug these gaps in the literature. (shrink)