Personal Identity And Personality

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In “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” John Perry conveys conversations between a philosopher and her two friends a few nights before she dies. We then come to how the dying philosopher is trying to have everyone convince her that she will survive even after her body dies. In this John Perry claims that there are three ways of deliberating personal identity: bodily identity, psychological continuity and immaterial soul. The essay then describes the different types of identity and how they can use them to prove to the perishing philosopher that she can still remain alive. I will argue that the only way we can distinguish personal identity is through psychological continuity and how we can determine a person based on their memories and experiences. From this we can go into discussion about some terms that will be used throughout this paper.
For the purposes of this paper I will be defining personality and psychological continuity and personal identity. Personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. It means that personality is what we can use to help define a person as him or herself. Another term that will be vastly used is psychological continuity. Psychological continuity is when one person’s psychological states are continuous such as their memories, experience, and personality. Finally personal identity is how a person thinks or defines him or herself in this world.
In order to show that the best account of identity is psychological continuity I present the following argument:
P1. The best account of personal identity is either psychological continuity, bodily identity, or the immaterial soul.
P2. The best account of personal identity is not bodi...

... middle of paper ...

...rk and focus on the birds. In general these two people could have similar experiences but they would look at them differently and because of how they view their experience differently is how we can tell they are different people.
I have shown throughout this essay that we can determine personal identity solely based on psychological continuity. During John Perry’s dialogue he says that there are only three ways in which we can tell a person is who they are. Those three ideas being a person is their body, a person has a continuation of memory, or a person is their immaterial soul. Through the whole of this essay we have discussed that even though bodily identity and immaterial souls are a good suggestions for determining personal identity that they really aren’t logical theories. I have argued that we can distinguish personal identity from psychological continuity.

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