Temporal Selves?
Time: Wed 3.5. 14.15-15.45
Place: Soc&Com (Snellmaninkatu 12), room 234
Abstract: Temporal selves are common characters in contemporary philosophical works on personal identity, moral psychology, and diachronic rationality. They are used to describe and often explain such phenomena as diachronic inconsistencies, changes of mind, temptation, weakness of will, future-directed intentions. How seriously should we take talk of temporal selves? Are they just a philosophically innocent façon de parler or should they be taken to be real entities, possibly even more fundamental than temporally extended persons? Or are temporal selves just time-slices of persons by analogy with time-slices of any extended entity? In this paper, I will argue that there is a distinctive notion of ’temporal self’—a moral psychological one—which helps account for the distinctive temporal conflicts faced by extended beings like us, beings whose executive capacities are limited to the present time but whose cognition, cares, and standpoint extend over a much larger span of time and in the mode of temporal integration rather than just temporal continuity. I will close with some tentative suggestions about the role of temporal selves in accounting for temporal personal identity.