Self Identity, Part I

What makes me the person I am? Two popular answers are that my identity depends on the continuing existence of my body, or that my identity depends on some psychological continuity, such as the functioning and extent of memory. The seventeenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, argued that conditions of identity are relative to the kind or sort of thing we are thinking about. Living things are not just masses of matter but organized assemblages of parts that support growth, nutrition and sometimes self-repair. We explain why Locke thought that A could be the same human being as B, but not the same person, and discuss Locke's idea that memory can be an adequate condition for personal identity. Copyright 2013 Jack Reynolds / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.