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
Here is a brief summary of the argument of persisting persons. Parfit, with the help of the work of David Hume, believes that there is no enduring self. That is to say, that the person I am when I was born of the mother’s womb is not the person I am today, and the person I am today is not the same person ten years, ten days or perhaps ten minutes from now. Parfit argues for a perduring self. People are able to persist through time through overlapping psychological mental states. This is similar to Hume’s Bundle Theory, which argues that the self is made up of a bundle of overlapping experiences, conscious events, rather than a central person. When Parfit talks of persistence, what he means by persistence is these ongoing psychological states. For people seeking answers about the big life and death questions about identity, Parfit does not provide any answers here. In fact, he wants people to get over the idea of identity through time because it assumes that there is a right answer concerning identity. Essentially, it is a waste of time to worry if you are going to be the same person or not.
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.
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
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.
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
In “A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” Miller says, “[…] If you were merely a living human body, as this Kleenex box is merely cardboard and glue in a certain arrangement, then the death of your body would be the end of you. But surely you are more than that, fundamentally more than that. What is fundamentally you is not your body, but your soul or self or mind. […] They [souls] are the non-physical, nonmaterial, aspects of you. They [souls] are your consciousness”. Then Weirob says, “[…] if I understand you, this is not a remark about this body you see and could touch and I fear can smell. Rather it is a remark about a soul, which you cannot see or touch or smell. The fact that the same body was across the body was across the booth from you at Dorsey’s as in now lying in front of you on the bed-that would not mean that the same person was present on both occasions, if the same soul were not. And if, though some strange turn of events, the same soul were present on both occasions, but lodged in different bodies, then it would be the same person. Is that right”, (John Perry, page 385). This is significant, because John Perry is talking about one his hypothesis that a person is their immaterial soul. He is purposing that the immaterial soul is not the same as the physical body. He explains that ...
According to this theory, what the character faces and feels shapes whom they become, and the process of identity is continuous throughout the character’s life. This is demonstrated in The Epic of Gilgamesh as Gilgamesh struggles with his own identity in considering Enkidu, a man of the wild, as an equal. It is also apparent when Gilgamesh confronts his own mortality when witnessing Enkidu’s demise. In The Tempest, Caliban is defiant and wishes to hold fast to his identity although Prospero attempts to colonize him. This idea of evolving throughout experiences to discover one is particularly fascinating to me, and that is precisely why I chose to explore the identity lens
In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010).
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)
We as human beings have the tendency to perceive many things in the world to remain constant throughout the course of time. This belief brings up the question of what makes something the same over time, and more importantly what makes a person the same over time, which ties in with an issue of personal identity. Personal identity, in the broadest sense, is the self-concept of whom we perceive we are. The complication of personal identity is identifying and knowing what exactly it means to be the same person over time. One can simply state physical appearance or mental state falls under the criteria to determine what makes someone the same person over time, but it is far more complex and too simple to just say that because our bodies and mental states are constantly changing. It is strenuous difficult to find a solution to this problem due to finding the criteria necessary to confirm if someone is the same person from years, days, or even minutes prior.
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:
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.
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.
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
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