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True to his philosophical commitment to grounding his ideas in sense experience, Locke, in his essay entitled “On Personal Identity” (from his most famous work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) engages in a reflective analysis of how we experience our self in our everyday lives.
Feb 11, 2019 · 1. Locke on Persons and Personal Identity: The Basics. 2. Locke on Persons: What’s Up for Debate. 3. The Early Modern Reception of Locke’s Picture of Persons. 4. Locke’s Lasting Impact on the Personal Identity Debate. Bibliography. Primary Literature by Locke. Other Historical Literature. Contemporary Literature. Academic Tools.
John Locke accepts that every perception gives me immediate and intuitive knowledge of my own existence. However, this knowledge is limited to the present moment when I have the perception.
For Locke, it means that the self is defined by what we do—or, perhaps, can—self-attribute, through recollection and/or appropriation. Kant repudiates the basic strategy shared by Locke and Hume, for he denies that self-awareness reveals objective facts about personal identity.
In his Essay, Locke suggests that the self is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” and continues to define personal identity simply as “the sameness of a rational being” (Locke).
Sep 2, 2001 · John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher. Locke’s monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is one of the first great defenses of modern empiricism and concerns itself with determining the limits of human understanding in respect to a wide spectrum of topics.
Jun 25, 2013 · Introduction. John Locke offered a very rich and influential account of persons and personal identity in “Of Identity and Diversity,” which is chapter 27 of Book 2 of his An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He added it to the second edition in 1694 upon the recommendation of his friend William Molyneux.
Linked to the notion of consciousness is that of self-concern: its main function for personal identity is that through it the subject relates to its own future; it also connects cognitive features (consciousness and memory) with the moral and legal features of personal identity.
Locke: Epistemology. John Locke (1632-1704), one of the founders of British Empiricism, is famous for insisting that all our ideas come from experience and for emphasizing the need for empirical evidence.
However, one philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704), argued that the self resides in memory. In what follows I will give an overview of the arguments that led him to this conclusion, and consider some of the objections critics have raised against Locke’s account of the self, in particular his reducing the self to memory.
