Name: Osama Khalid
Student no: 1001668091
TA: Kevin Kuhl
Paper 2
Personal identity
The issue of personal identity and its determents has always been of concern for many philosophers. Questions are asked as what does being the person that you are, from one time to some future time necessarily consist of. This theory is the philosophical confrontation with the ultimate questions of our own existence, for instance, as who are we, and if there is a life after death? This type of analysis of personal identity provides a set of mandatory and sufficient conditions for the identity of the person over time. This concept in modern philosophy is sometimes referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity, where the predicament …show more content…
He elucidated that the notion of identity of living things and identity of a physical body cannot be used to render personal identity. He explained the continuity of personal identity through time by three factors: memory, Self-awareness and consciousness. I support the view that personal identity over time consists in psychological continuity. In terms of memory, Locke believes that it is the memory of a person that defines your personal identity. There has to be a line through time that traces your past memories to your current memories. If you are a sixty year old man and you remember playing in the playground when you were a nine year old boy then logically if you remember doing something in the past then you are the same person, thus you maintain your personal identity. As for self-awareness (self) and consciousness, Locke interprets self as the conscious thinking which is sensible of contentment and suffering, able to feel joy or misery and to think and descry. Furthermore, as found in “Of Identity and Diversity”, When we do certain things such as hear, eat, and feel, we know that we are performing these processes. This shows that cognizance is accompanied by thinking at all …show more content…
Unsurprisingly, none of his friends can identify him as the “black man” until he interacts with them and recounts the memories they shared, and that is when they associate the white man’s body with him i.e. even though he had a different body, he had the same memories implying that he was the same person. Hence he had the same personal identity. Then he dies again and all his memories, beliefs and soul are placed in another body and the same process is repeated again about him telling his friends referring to shared memories and then they associate the new body to his old personal identity, but this time after one day his memory is wiped out, and he gains the memories of the person who occupied that body before him. As it happens, his friends are no longer able to associate that body with his old identity and he is thought to have disappeared from existence. Therefore this supports the idea that personal identity is allied to the psychological continuity of a person as his allies recogonised his personal identity with his consciousness and memory but not by his physical appearance. Moreover, suppose an example to back the argument would be that if I attend my college reunion ten years from now. In order to find out if some person Z is the same person as I remember him, all I would have to
Student no: 1001668091
TA: Kevin Kuhl
Paper 2
Personal identity
The issue of personal identity and its determents has always been of concern for many philosophers. Questions are asked as what does being the person that you are, from one time to some future time necessarily consist of. This theory is the philosophical confrontation with the ultimate questions of our own existence, for instance, as who are we, and if there is a life after death? This type of analysis of personal identity provides a set of mandatory and sufficient conditions for the identity of the person over time. This concept in modern philosophy is sometimes referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity, where the predicament …show more content…
He elucidated that the notion of identity of living things and identity of a physical body cannot be used to render personal identity. He explained the continuity of personal identity through time by three factors: memory, Self-awareness and consciousness. I support the view that personal identity over time consists in psychological continuity. In terms of memory, Locke believes that it is the memory of a person that defines your personal identity. There has to be a line through time that traces your past memories to your current memories. If you are a sixty year old man and you remember playing in the playground when you were a nine year old boy then logically if you remember doing something in the past then you are the same person, thus you maintain your personal identity. As for self-awareness (self) and consciousness, Locke interprets self as the conscious thinking which is sensible of contentment and suffering, able to feel joy or misery and to think and descry. Furthermore, as found in “Of Identity and Diversity”, When we do certain things such as hear, eat, and feel, we know that we are performing these processes. This shows that cognizance is accompanied by thinking at all …show more content…
Unsurprisingly, none of his friends can identify him as the “black man” until he interacts with them and recounts the memories they shared, and that is when they associate the white man’s body with him i.e. even though he had a different body, he had the same memories implying that he was the same person. Hence he had the same personal identity. Then he dies again and all his memories, beliefs and soul are placed in another body and the same process is repeated again about him telling his friends referring to shared memories and then they associate the new body to his old personal identity, but this time after one day his memory is wiped out, and he gains the memories of the person who occupied that body before him. As it happens, his friends are no longer able to associate that body with his old identity and he is thought to have disappeared from existence. Therefore this supports the idea that personal identity is allied to the psychological continuity of a person as his allies recogonised his personal identity with his consciousness and memory but not by his physical appearance. Moreover, suppose an example to back the argument would be that if I attend my college reunion ten years from now. In order to find out if some person Z is the same person as I remember him, all I would have to