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Locke on Personal Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Harold Noonan
Harold Noonan
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
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Extract

In part I of this paper I defend Locke's account of personal identity against three well-known objections; in part II, I put forward a criticism of my own.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 205 , July 1978 , pp. 343 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

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References

1 The same animal, then, is always the same organized body, but not, as we shall see, the same body (see the passage from Locke's reply to Stillingfleet quoted below).

2 Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 45–46.Google Scholar

3 Note that Shoemaker thinks that Locke has simply not noticed the possibility of this deduction. This explains his saying that Locke questioned the view that a self is a substance.

4 See The Works of John Locke, A New Edition, Vol. IV (London: Davison, 1823), 308–310, 317, 320, 322, 323.Google Scholar The most striking passage is the following, from p. 323: ‘Your Lordship goes on and says, that I grant likewise, “that the identity of the same man consists in a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter in succession, vitally united to the same organized body”. Answ. I speak in these words of the identity of the same man, and your Lordship thence roundly concludes, “so that there is no difficulty of the sameness of the body”. But your Lordship knows, that I do not take these two sounds, man and body, to stand for the same thing; nor the identity of the man to be the same with the identity of the body.’ This passage also provides a perfect illustration of the claims I make in my next two sentences.

5 See his paper ‘Persons and Their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly VII, No. 4 (10 1970), 269.Google Scholar

6 Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 3–4.Google Scholar

7 ‘Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity’ in Martin, and Armstrong, (eds), Locke and Berkeley (London: Macmillan 1968), 163–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 What the remarks Flew quotes from Locke do show, however, is a momentary departure from his ‘official’ view that personal identity not only is but ought to be the sole bearer of moral responsibility.