What is the self?

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What is personal identity? Surely most people have some rough idea of what it is, but there is more to it than what people think. So often people in life assume for the sake of assuming not aware of how little they actually know. On the topic of person identity there were two great philosophers David Hume, and John Locke both of whom held very different views on the topic, but they both show just how deep this topic can be. Hume's "Of personal identity" and Locke's "Of Identity and diversity" are two powerful and well written essays ripe for critics. The goal is to find a commonality between the ideas, analyze them separately and explain why both were wrong.
David Hume and John Locke both appealed to the senses in some way or another to explain personal identity or "the self". They believed that the self could not exist outside of the senses because all knowledge of the world comes from the senses in their view the self being no different. Both spoke of how diversity (the sequence of senses/impressions) plays a huge part in creating the self. Even though both Hume and Locke agreed t...

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