What makes someone the same person over time?

This is the question that Teaching Predoctoral Fellow Phillip Barron hopes to answer in his first year in the Lewis & Clark philosophy department. Having completed the necessary coursework at the University of Connecticut, he is now at LC working on the first year of a two-year predoctoral fellowship, and currently teaching PHIL 217: Conceptions of Selfhood and Personal Identity. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he hopes to give a new perspective of the idea of personal identity through narrative theory.

“(Narrative theorists) are people who say that an essential part of your identity revolves around the stories that you tell about yourself,” Barron said. “My argument is that narrative theory is … the only (theory) that can say, ‘This is why psychological continuity matters, this is why bodily continuity matters.’” 

Read the rest of the interview/profile at the Pioneer Log, the student-run newspaper at Lewis & Clark College.