Phenomenology and Mind 29

Personal identity has long stood at the crossroads of some of philosophy's most vexed questions. What makes a person the same over time? What constitutes the unity of selfhood amid the flux of experience, the transformations of the body, and the shifting social worlds in which each of us is embedded? Philosophy has approached these questions from multiple angles—metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic. Yet new and pressing questions continue to emerge, particularly in light of contemporary challenges to the very notion of personhood: the rise of artificial intelligence, the politicization of identity, the fragility of memory and embodiment, and the pluralization of gender and social belonging.
This special issue of Phenomenology and Mind gathers a selection of contributions that engage with this multifaceted debate. The aim is not to provide a unified or definitive theory of personal identity, but rather to illuminate its constitutive tensions and its manifold developments. The collection brings together phenomenological analyses of subjectivity and embodiment; investigations into the relationship between self and experience, as well as mind and brain, in the process of perceiving one's own identity and personal agency; feminist analyses of gender identity and gendered language; and, finally, aesthetic approaches that view art as both expressing and reshaping identity.