ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the arguments of Bernard Williams’ well-known and influential paper, ‘The Self and the Future’. The implication of the paper is that there is nothing straightforwardly wrong with either argument, despite their conflicting conclusions, and hence that there is some sort of conflict or antimony at the heart of our concept of personal identity. Williams argues that what he first presented as two puzzle cases are, in fact, nothing of the kind; they are, rather, the same puzzle case with irrelevant differences in presentation. Williams’ argument for describing his first case as one in which bodies are exchanged. Williams’ argument against a psychological-continuity criterion of personal identity and in favour of the description of his second case yielded by the bodily criterion of personal identity is unconvincing. Williams’ conundrum, considered as a threat to the complex view, is thus disarmed.
