I’m a first year DPhil researcher in Philosophy. My research concerns the concept of relative identity and its significance both in contemporary metaphysics and in the history of philosophy and theology, especially Scholasticism and Chinese Buddhism. This project builds on my previous research on Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of identity statements in Trinitarian theology. As a Dominican friar residing in Blackfriars Priory (Oxford), I am also interested in interreligious dialogue and intercultural approaches to theology.
DPhil topic
'The metaphysics of relative identity'
Identity is a concept underlying many fields of scientific and philosophical discourse and is widely assumed to be a single absolute relation. The relative identity thesis challenges this assumption by proposing that two entities may be identical in one respect (for example, the same person or substance) while differing in another (such as being distinct collections of particles), without presupposing any underlying absolute notion of identity. This view has been developed in recent times by Peter Geach and has also been linked, in various forms, to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Zhiyi. This thesis offers a sustained examination of relative identity, focusing both on its conceptual content and on the most plausible metaphysical framework for ordinary objects that could support it. To this end, it analyses the positions of Geach, Aquinas, and Zhiyi, aiming to provide a historically informed and philosophically rigorous account of relative identity.
