ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with discussion of the history of the problem of personal identity with John Locke, who gives the problem its first clearly identifiable formulation in the famous chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It explores naturally leads on to a consideration of Locke’s thesis that ‘person’ is ‘a Forensic term appropriating actions and their merits, and so belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law, and happiness and misery’. The most obvious and important motives for Locke’s discussion was to provide an account of personal identity that would make sense of the Christian doctrines of human immortality, the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. Locke’s real reasons for his conviction that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness emerge more clearly, however, if students think again of the underlying aims of his discussion.
