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UNIT6: PHILOSOPHY:
PERSONAL IDENTITY
A123: INTRODUCTION TO HUMANITIES
What Philosophy Is
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The word Philosophy is derived from the old
Greek and Roman Philosophia.
Philo + Sophia
Philo = love of
Sophia = wisdom
Philosophia = love of wisdom
A philosophy is a comprehensive system of
ideas about human nature and the nature of the
reality we live in.
Because the issues it addresses are basic,
philosophy is a guide for living, determining the
course we take in life, and how we treat other
people.
Categories of Philosophy
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The ancient Greeks organized the
subject into five basic categories:
aesthetics, epistemology, ethics,
politics, and metaphysics.
This organization of the subject is still
largely in use today and can be
profitably used regardless of where
one’s
answers
to
specific
philosophical questions lie.
Branches of Philosophy
Aesthetics (the theory of the nature of art)
Epistemology (the theory of knowledge)
Ethics (the theory of moral values)
Metaphysics (the theory of reality and
existence)
Politics (the theory of legal rights and
government)
John Locke
 John Locke widely known as the Father of Liberalism,
was an English philosopher and physician regarded as
one of the most influential of Enlightenment
thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British
empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon,
he is equally important to social contract theory. His
work had a great impact upon the development of
epistemology and political philosophy. His writings
influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American
revolutionaries. His contributions to classical
republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the
American Declaration of Independence.
John Locke
 Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin
of modern conceptions of identity and the self,
figuring prominently in the work of later
philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant.
Locke was the first to define the self through a
continuity of consciousness. He postulated that
the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa.
Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he
maintained that we are born without innate ideas,
and that knowledge is instead determined only by
experience derived from sense perception.
Personal Identity – John
Locke
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In philosophy, Personal Identity refers to the essence of a
self-conscious person, which makes him or her unique.
It persists making the person modifications happen through
one single identity.
The question regarding personal identity has addressed the
conditions under which a person at one time is the same
person at another time, known as personal continuity.
This sort of analysis of personal identity provides a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of the
person over time.
Aristotle
 Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato
and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover
many subjects, including physics, metaphysics,
poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics,
government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together
with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is
one of the most important founding figures in
Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first
to create a comprehensive system of Western
philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics,
logic and science, politics and metaphysics.
Aristotle
 His works contain the earliest known formal study of
logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century
into modern formal logic. In metaphysics,
Aristotelianism had a profound influence on
philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic
and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it
continues to influence Christian theology, especially
the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church and
some strains of Eastern Orthodox thought. His ethics,
though always influential, gained renewed interest
with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of
Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of
active academic study today.
Memory- Aristotle
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Memory to Aristotle is “the cabinet of imagination,
the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience,
and the council chamber of thought.”
Memory’s value to the thinking mind has never
been controversial.
What has at times been controversial is the value
of memory with respect to personal identity.
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Any experience that a person could remember is
his/hers, one that happened to him/her.
Thus, the distinction between knowing of present
experiences by our five external senses and
knowing of them by our sixth inner sense is carried
over into memory.
It requires that our minds remember everything that
has ever happened to us, forgetting nothing along
the way.
Of course, we CANNOT remember EVERYTHING.
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Sydney Shoemaker, a prominent critic of ‘memory theory’
explained that being capable of making memory
statements about our own past is part of the concept of a
person.
Since it is a theoretical truth that memory statements are
generally true, it is a conceptual truth that people are
capable of knowing their own pasts in a special way that
does not involve the use of criteria of personal identity.
It is also a logical fact that the memory claims whatever a
person makes, and that can be used by others as grounds
for statements about the past history of that person.
Memory would seem to be a necessary condition of
personal identity.