Blackwell Reference Online

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It is hard to say what personal identity is. Discussions that go under that heading are most often about some of the following questions. Who am I ? To most people, the phrase “personal identity” suggests what we might call one's individual identity. Your identity in this sense consists roughly of those attributes that make you unique as an individual and different from others. Or it is the way you see or define yourself, which may be different from the way you really are. Persistence. When psychologists talk about personal identity, they usually mean it in the “Who am I?” sense. Philosophers generally mean something quite different. Most often they mean what it takes for a person to persist from one time to another — for the same person to exist at different times. They are asking for our persistence conditions. What sorts of adventure could you possibly survive? What sort of thing would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which future being, or which past one, is you? You point to a girl in an old photograph and say that she is you. What makes you that one — rather than, say, one of the others? What is it about the way she relates to you as you are now that makes her you? Historically, this question often arises out of the hope that we might continue to exist after we die. Whether this is in any sense possible depends on whether biological death is the ... log in or subscribe to read full text