Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1988. Her main areas of interest are personal identity, practical reasoning, and the philosophy of mind. Her book, The Constitution of Selves (Cornell 1996), argues that contemporary metaphysical discussions of personal identity over time fail to distinguish between two distinct but related questions, one having to do with re-identifying persons and the other with determining the essential features of character, value, and commitment that make a person who she is. She has continued her research in this area, and is currently completing a book manuscript which argues for an expanded and more socially dependent concept of personhood and endorses the view that personal identity should be defined in terms of the continuity of a characteristic “person life”. She is also interested in questions of autonomy, the philosophy of psychology, and existentialism, and is a member of UIC's Laboratory of Integrated Neuroscience.