What is Identity
Identity is the percieved persistence of the structure of an entity through its transformation over time. Identity might be dependent on context as people can have multiple identities as manifestation of their persistence within different worlds - professional, social, recreational, etc. The issue of identity is discussed by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists as well as educators and computer scientists (digital identity).
For the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity and the notion of vague identity."
Our focus to address the issue of digital identity is the discussion about personal identity (cf. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia).
