Ajinkya Deshmukh

I hope to answer some questions related to group identity. By group identity I mean a sense of identity that requires the possibility that at least two persons to share something in common, such as nationality, favourite sports team, caste or gender. This commonality could be biological or physical, or it could be institutional or social. There is some hesitation among analytic philosophers to tackle the question of group identity, perhaps because it is difficult to pin down. Any rigorous treatment of group identity must then take on the fundamental anxiety plaguing its study: that such identities are not `stable', or are so `fluid' as to evade meaningful categorical analysis.

If it is true that group identity keeps changing in a way that resists stable denitions, then this changing nature raises modal questions about the nature of group identity. Is the changing nature a necessary feature or is it the mere possibility of change that is necessary? If these modal qualities hold, do they apply to all group identities or only to a subset of them? If the latter, is there a way to identify these subsets? If such identication is possible, does it follow a pattern or is it purely heuristic?

Social ontology, group identity

Dr Thomas Smith (Primary supervisor)

Dr Frederique Janssen-Lauret (Secondary supervisor)