Personal Life Forms: Identity - Unity - Normativity

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The research project draws on the intuition that in the concept of a person both ontological and practical identity are deeply interwoven. In the current debate on personal identity, this constitutive unity has been neglected by considering each kind of identity separately. Complementarily and against this tendency to explain personal identity either by referring to merely ontological or practical characteristics, the research project aims to make explicit the ontological and practical identity in their mutual relationship. Therefore, the guiding question of the project is whether the relation of ontological and practical identity can be further explained by referring to a certain form aspect that has to do with the specific life that persons normally lead. The unity of both approaches shall be further explained by developing a concept of a personal life form. My approach is the following: “person” is a meaningful, non-reductive concept that presupposes the concept of life but transforms it in a specific way. This transformation shall be explained in terms of the concepts of freedom insofar as persons are higher-order animals that act by referring to themselves and other persons. The freedom of personal life forms does not only consist in their self-referentiality, a first-person perspective, but in maintaining an intersubjective form – a personal lifeworld – that reacts on the associated individuals – independently from their actual realization of specific personal properties.