John Locke Personal Identity Analysis

Most modern, Western citizens would not question the idea that they are a separate and autonomous being, completely independent and different in every way from their neighbor. When asked, some might answer that what makes them different is their personality, their soul, or their mind. The discrepancy lies in the fact that, between individuals, all of these can be similar. Does that imply that two individuals who are similar in personality have less of a ‘self’ than someone who is vastly different? Does believing that one has a concrete self, separate from all others, make it true? I’m going to focus primarily on personal identity and the nature of the soul for the purposes of this essay.
The main dilemma in approaching the discourse on the …show more content…
His Memory Theory attempted to explain the inconsistency of the self over time; many difficulties in defining the self arose from the fact that nothing remained the same transcendent of time. He goes on to say that the self only extends as far as the consciousness, or memory, does. The example he uses to defend his point is the examples of the Prince and the Cobbler (Locke 1689). If the prince had all of his memories transferred into the cobbler’s body, and the cobbler had all of his memories transferred into the prince’s body, the question was, “are the prince and the cobbler still the same ‘selves,’ even if, to the outsider, they are …show more content…
If the soul gives the body actuality, but only as far as its original potentiality can go, it is the same as Locke saying that the self only extends as far as the consciousness, is we take the self to be actual and the consciousness to be potential. Aristotle also didn’t believe that the soul was entirely separate from the