Vincent Descombes/ Alan Montefiore/ Danielle Sands

Thursday 11 December 2014
Wolfson Theatre

Vincent Descombes, Visiting Professor of French Literature, University of Chicago and Director of Studies, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris.

Alan Montefiore, Emeritus Fellow, Balliol College, University of Oxford and President of the Forum for European Philosophy

Chair: Danielle Sands, Lecturer in Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

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 discussed some of the multiple complexities in what he has called Les embarras de l’identité.