of identity offer an easy way out. There is this photograph of a boy on
horseback. That’s me, though I haven’t gone horseback riding for decades. I’m
not essentially an equestrian, and I don’t look much like the boy on the horse.
Still it’s me.
Thus we need criteria that enable us to say that a particular person, x 1 , at one
point in time, t 1 , is the same person as x 2 at another point in time, t 2.
Four approaches
Current philosophical approaches that try to provide such criteria are of four
kinds: empiricist reductionism, mentalist essentialism, ordinary language
analysis, and interactionism.
Reductionism strives to reduce all facts about personal identity to empirically
researchable facts about bodies, brains, sense perceptions, behavioural patterns,
and how these are interrelated. Personal identity is somatic, consisting of
physical matter. A person’s enjoyment of watching the gulls in the sky will
eventually be explainable in terms of moving particles. Puzzle: what is a person?
Mentalist essentialism is the view that minds (souls) are different from bodies;
more than that, they are the essence of people’s individual identity. A variety of
this view espoused by religious philosophers and theologians holds that a soul
can continue to exist after its body dies (e.g. transmigration of souls in
Hinduism). Non-religious philosophers can only keep looking for mental
processes that establish psychological continuity from t 1 to t 2 . Religious thinkers
accept the mystery of the soul’s God-given nature, as paradigmatically does the
dogma of the Catholic Church. Puzzle: when and how is a body ensouled?
Ordinary language analysts take an altogether different approach. Since language
is a universal faculty of humanity and since every known language has terms of
self-reference, they argue, the logical reconstruction of sentences in which words
such as ‘I’ occur will help us understand what self and hence personal identity is.
The sentence ‘I enjoy watching the gulls’ is fine, while ‘My body enjoys
watching the gulls’ is odd. Why? Puzzle: do children lack an identity before they
know how to use ‘I’ correctly?