The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness

Introduction

Several different intersecting questions are in play in philosophical discussions of personal

identity. One such question concerns the nature of persons: What makes someone a person?

Another question concerns the nature of self-identification: What makes someone the particular

person that she is? And yet a third question concerns the nature of a person’s existence through

time: What makes a person the same person over time?^1

In this chapter we focus primarily on the third question and, in particular, the role that

consciousness has played in philosophical attempts to answer it. We begin in Section 1 with the

memory-based view of personal identity offered by John Locke. Though this view faces various

objections, we turn in Section 2 to various adjustments that can be made to the view to make

it considerably more plausible. In Section 3 we turn away from these psychologically-based

approaches to physical alternatives. Finally, in Section 4, we turn to a consideration of how issues

related to immortality help shed light on the debate about personal identity.

1 The Lockean View

John Locke (1632–1704) is often considered the father of philosophical discussion of personal

identity. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he offered an account of personal identity

over time that has proved particularly influential:

since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every

one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking

things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: And

as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought,

so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now as it was then; and ’tis

by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done.

(Locke 1689/1975: 335)

In talking about extending one’s consciousness backward, Locke seems to have memory in

mind. In particular, it seems that he is here focusing on what is often called episodic or experience

1

CONSCIOUSNESS, PERSONAL

IDENTITY, AND IMMORTALITY

Amy Kind

Amy Kind Consciousness and Personal Identity