Consciousness and Personal Identity
In Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 245-264 (2014)
Abstract
This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us.Author Profiles
My notes
Similar books and articles
Experience, agency, and personal identity.Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2):1-24.
The Metaphysical Fact of Consciousness in Locke's Theory of Personal Identity.Shelley Weinberg - 2012 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (3):387-415.
The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity From Descartes to Hume.Udo Thiel - 2011 - Oxford University Press.
Review of K. Joanna S. Forstrom, John Locke and Personal Identity: Immortality and Bodily Resurrection in 17th-Century Philosophy. [REVIEW]Shelley Weinberg - 2010 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (12).
The no-self theory: Hume, Buddhism, and personal identity.James Giles - 1993 - Philosophy East and West 43 (2):175-200.
Consciousness as a guide to personal persistence.Barry Dainton & Tim Bayne - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (4):549-571.
Self-consciousness and personal identity.Udo Thiel - 2006 - In The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind: Readings From Descartes to Strawson.Harold Morick (ed.) - 1970 - Harvester Press.
Personal identity and the past.Marya Schechtman - 2005 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 12 (1):9-22.
Analytics
Added to PP
2012-03-10
Downloads
1,796 (#3,024)
6 months
246 (#1,928)
2012-03-10
Downloads
1,796 (#3,024)
6 months
246 (#1,928)
Historical graph of downloads
Author Profiles
Citations of this work
Reasons and Conscious Persons.Christian Coseru - forthcoming - In Andrea Sauchelli (ed.), Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry. London: Routledge. pp. 160-186.
References found in this work
Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge.Richard Moran - 2001 - Princeton University Press.
A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.