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Soma (2015)

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Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. Personal identity has been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which I am not competent to discuss; Collins 1982 and Jinpa 2002 are useful sources.)

Personal identity is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. And ‘self’ does sometimes mean ‘person’. But it often means something different: some sort of immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning at all. This entry will avoid it.

We will first survey the main questions of personal identity. Most of the entry will then focus on the one that has received most attention in recent times, namely our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity
There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Here are the most familiar:

Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to certain properties to which a person feels a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those features she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) It may be, for instance, that being a philosopher and loving music belong to my identity, whereas being a man and living in Yorkshire do not. Someone else could have the same four properties but feel differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or loving music. It might also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s identity without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false. One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and changeable: different properties could have belonged to to the way one defines oneself as a person, and what properties these are can change over time. It contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this. (Ludwig 1997 is a typical discussion of this topic.)

Personhood. What is it to be a person? What is necessary, and what suffices, for something to count as a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in one’s development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f., Wiggins 1980: ch. 6).

Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of adventures is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one, rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions.

Historically this question often arises out of the hope (or fear) that we might continue to exist after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings one’s existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would that being have to relate to you as y

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