ABSTRACT
Joseph Butler commonly gets the credit for a different, if formally somewhat similar criticism, 'that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes'.95 Yet Leibniz had earlier advanced much the same point, if less elegantly:
an identity which is apparent to the person concerned - one who senses himself to be the same - presupposes a real identity obtaining through each immediate temporal transition accompanied by reflection, or by the sense of I; because an intimate and immediate perception cannot be mistaken in the natural course of things."
