ABSTRACT
The difficulties attending the traditional attempts to ground personal identity in either physical continuity (spatio-temporal) continuity or psychological continuity (memory or consciousness) are overwhelming. Derek Parfit's thought experiments appear to be rather conclusive in showing this. Of course, Parfit's interest in the question of personal identity is driven by his ethical concerns. As powerful as Parfit's thought experiments happen to be in calling into question the concept of personal identity, nevertheless, as indicated before, most extremely reluctant to give it up. The usual approach to the problem of personal identity based on a reductive understanding of the human being treats the person as a kind of pseudo-object. That is to say, if the problem of personal identity is to deal with the criterion that pertains to our ability to reidentify a human individual who supposedly persists in time, then the very way of posing the problem seems to use the model by which physical objects are reidentified.
