John Locke's Theory Of Personal Identity

844 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: LOcke's theory of personal identity

John Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity Many can remember a point in their life when they were a small child, carefree and happy with dirt on their knees and a smile on their face, but how can one know that he is the same person now as he was then? This is a question concerning personal identity; which addresses why someone at one point in life is identical with someone later in life. When it comes to personal identity and it’s persistence through time, many theories exist to explain what makes a person a person. One view is John Locke’s theory of personal identity. He stated that identity was not dependent on any material substance, such as one’s body, instead Locke maintained that personal identity is tied to consciousness and perceptions. …show more content…

This is known as the memory criterion. Locke illustrates this through his use of the Prince and the Cobbler. If the memories of a prince were put into the body of a cobbler and vice versa, which one is the prince and which is the cobbler? According to Locke the body of the Cobbler is now psychologically continuous with the Prince and is now the Prince, despite the fact that to the surrounding population he is still the same man as the cobbler he is the person of the prince. John Perry also illustrated this in his Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, Sam Miller relates this concept to a double-header. If one were to get up toward the end of the first game and come back the logical question would be to ask is if it was the same game as before. It being logical doing to one not being able to simply look at the game and tell that it is still the first game, because players come and go but it could still be the same game. The game could even be moved to another field but as long as certain aspects stayed constant (the score, batting order, etc.) it would still be the same game. This illustration could easily be applied to people. You don’t have to be the same physically, just so long as there are connecting factors, such as …show more content…

Olson in “Personal Identity” illustrates his concern by giving us the example of a young student who grows into a lawyer, the lawyer remembers paying a fine as child for over-due library books but as the lawyer grows into an elderly woman the woman members law school but no longer paying the fine. According to Locke’s theory the lawyer is the child, and the elderly woman is the lawyer but not the child. This is a result that should not be possible due to the law of

Show More
Related

  • John Perry A Dialogue On Personal Identity

    1153 Words  | 3 Pages

    Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Hume And Locke On Personal Identity

    723 Words  | 2 Pages

    Locke and Hume both agree that memory is key to define personal identity. Locke believes that memory and consciousness define personal identity. While Hume’s thinks it is the source of personal identity, he does not fully agree with Locke and thinks that memory reveals personal identity, it does not create it. They both agree that there is a change; Locke understands that a person changes and what relates everything to who we are is

    Read More

  • John Locke Theory In Frankenstein

    1006 Words  | 3 Pages

    A child goes through many experiences in their moments of adolescence. It is stereotyped that everyone grows to become their own individual. But most children become a product of the environment that they were raised in and the events that took place in that individual 's childhood, leaving them to still be a unique individual but never truly their own person. John locke’s theory about a human changing due to events that occur in life are shown in Mary Shelley’s frankenstein, The Huffington Post, The Global Post, and Livestrong.

    Read More

  • Locke Memory Theory

    1076 Words  | 3 Pages

    John Locke believes that A is identical with B, if and only if, A remembers the thoughts, feelings, and actions had or done by B. This shows that the important feature, memory, is linking a person from the beginning of their life to the end of their life. Locke’s memory theory would look something like this: The self changes over time, so it may seem like personal identity changes too. However, even if you are changing, you are still retaining past memories. Therefore, if you can retain memories, memories are the link between you and an earlier you, so personal identity persists over time. So, memory is the necessary and sufficient condition of personal identity. Locke’s theory says that we are

    Read More

  • Personal Identity And Immmorality Analysis

    689 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the passage “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality,” John Perry eludes to three different ways of thinking about personal identity. The three ideas were: a person is their body, a person is their immaterial soul, and a person has continuity of memory. Perry’s idea of that a person is their immaterial soul best describes personal identity.

    Read More

  • Philosophy Paper #1: Personal Identity

    1056 Words  | 3 Pages

    What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:

    Read More

  • Derek Parfit's Bundle Theory

    601 Words  | 2 Pages

    David Hume was a philosopher who was interest in person identities and created the Bundle Theory. The Bundle Theory is an ontological theory about objects in which it consists of a bundle of properties, relations, or expressions. The object consists of its properties and nothing more than that, which means that there cannot be an object without its properties and no one can even think or imagine such an object. Every person is just a series of different events, states, sensations, and thoughts. We often question ourselves without identity with questions such as who are we? What makes who we are over time? Or what makes us the same person that we were since birth? Derek Parfit was another philosopher who was very interest in personal identity,

    Read More

  • John Locke's Theory Of Personal Identity

    815 Words  | 2 Pages

    From Locke's point of view, a person is a "thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself...in different times and places...{through} only consciousness which is inseparable from thinking" and can only be considered the same person over time if he or she retains their memories. For Locke, it is the capacity to reason, understand, and browse through our memories and thoughts that makes a individual a full fledged person rather than being just a human being or dog or dolphin or any other non-human animal. This presents major implications on the concept of what identity over time is. Locke believed that when it came to this topic, our corporeal self was insignificant as living things cannot just depend on the sameness of particles to be considered to have th...

    Read More

  • Anomalous Characters: Understanding Good and Evil Shifts

    854 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his book, he addresses the questions of “What makes a person at two different times one and the same person? What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of each person over time?” (Parfit 1984:202)

    Read More

  • The Memory Theory Of John Locke And Locke's Personal Identity

    1057 Words  | 3 Pages

    Personal identity examines what makes a person at one time identical with a person at another. Many philosophers believe we are always changing and therefore, we cannot have a persisting identity if we are different from one moment to the next. However, many philosophers believe there is some important feature that determines a person’s identity and keeps it persistent. For John Locke, this important feature is memory, and I agree. Memory is the most important feature in determining a person’s identity as memory is the necessary and sufficient condition of personal identity.

    Read More

  • Adversity: A Short Story

    979 Words  | 2 Pages

    What makes us who we truly are? Some say our decisions define us, others our experiences, and still others believe our identities are all predetermined by our genetics. A simple story I have heard offers an answer to this controversy. If a person throws an egg, a carrot, and a coffee bean each into a pot of boiling water, the outcome is different for each of them. The egg will harden, the carrot will soften, and the coffee bean will change the water it was in. The water in this analogy symbolizes adversity. All of the objects faced the same adversity, but each responded in a unique way. Similarly, some people’s hearts are hardened by their negative experiences, but others take those experiences and transform them into learning opportunities.

    Read More

  • Hume Personal Identity

    237 Words  | 1 Pages

    In David Hume’s Personal Identity, published in the late 1730s, he rejects the idea of identity over time. He believes there are no persons that continue to exist. They are merely impressions.

    Read More

  • John Locke's Treatment Of Personal Identity

    799 Words  | 2 Pages

    Locke was the first one to separate out the specific issue of personal identity from the larger topic of identity in general. Locke's treatment of personal identity might seem counterintuitive to a lot of people, especially his claim that consciousness, and therefore personal identity, are independent of all substances. Notice, however, that the claim is not that consciousness can exist independent of a body or a mind, only that there is no reason to assume that consciousness is tied to any particular body or mind. Still, there is no reason to assume, on this view, that consciousness cannot be transferred from one body or mind

    Read More

  • Locke Personal Identity

    584 Words  | 2 Pages

    John Locke believes that personal identity is about the human mind that has episodes of overlapping memories occur from how I can explain it based on how I perceived while reading his point of views. Locke considers the self to be really based upon our memory or consciousness and not on the matter of either soul or the body. From what I perceived, I think that on how Locke argued against the soul and body theories of personal identity was that the mind is defined by the experience, the perception and the rumination. But Locke’s main argument regarding personal identity is that personal identity is all about our self-consciousness. In Chapter 6 “Self” of Introducing Philosophy by Solomon, it states, “whose identity is based on the continuity of the body, just as you would say that you have had “the same car” for

    Read More

  • John Locke's Natural Rights: Life, Liberty, And Property

    150 Words  | 1 Pages

    John Locke’s Natural Rights stated that all men have three rights they are born with: life, liberty, and property. The first right is life. When a person is created, they are given life. They have the freedom to do what they want with themselves. The next right is liberty. People are given liberty. When someone is born they are automatically given the liberty to move, breathe, talk, etc.; however, some liberty must be earned. The last right is property. While having property would make most people happy, some people may not be as satisfied. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson pulled these three main ideas from Locke and incorporated them into the document. While the life and liberty rights stayed the same, he altered the idea of

    Read More

More about John Locke's Theory Of Personal Identity

Open Document