Abstract

The growing field of neuro-philosophy throws up important issues for our society about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time: if my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? This chapter explores some of the work of the French neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou as she asks, and tries to answer, this fundamental question about who we think we are, giving a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity. I argue that Malabou has implicit within her writing the seeds of a more adequate account which would not understand identity and personhood to be immanent to the material brain but would embrace a broader notion of identity distributed across relationships, institutions, and shared common narratives.