Questions of Identity

Contributor(s): Professor Vincent Descombes, Alan Montefiore | What does it mean to speak of an individual’s very identity as a person? And what too of the ongoing identity of an institution or a group? And how is the sense of ‘identity’ as that which is identical related to ‘that which defines what and who we are’? Vincent Descombes will discuss some of the multiple complexities in what he has called Les embarras de l’identité. Vincent Descombes is a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. Alan Montefiore is Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford and President of the Forum for European Philosophy.