ABSTRACT
Many philosophers writing on personal identity would be happy to describe themselves as lockean’ or, at least, ‘neo-Lockean’ in their approach to the topic, whilst many others would naturally define their positions by their opposition to Locke. Locke also clearly intends his account of personal identity to make sense of the knowledge we have of our own identities over time. An admirable set of objectives one might think, at least for a philosopher of Locke’s time, and yet the resulting theory is an extraordinary one. The core of Locke’s view is that consciousness makes personal identity. In the light of this, some commentators have attempted to read into Locke the proposal that identity over time for spirits and atoms is a matter of spatio-temporal continuity. Locke moves toward his account of personal identity in carefully controlled stages.
