Patrick Stokes

Abstract   Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7 Authors Patrick Stokes, Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433

Paolo Diego Bubbio's Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition offers a valuable and insightful discussion of the place of sacrifice plays in nineteenth century European philosophy, setting the stage for its emergence as a central theme in subsequent continental thought. Bubbio offers a strong case for the claim that the foundational move of the post-Kantian tradition is a fundamentally kenotic one. Bubbio is also critical of certain excesses in the way sacrifice is discussed in more recent work. However, the case of Kierkegaard in particular suggests kenosis is not so easily kept within the comfortable boundaries Bubbio prescribes for it: its excesses may be an integral part, rather than a hyperbolic distortion, of the logic of sacrifice.