Of Personal Identity, Joseph Butler What constitute a personal identity at a given time or through time?

In what relevant ways, if any, can you say that you are the same person today as you were yesterday? Butler says that strange perplexities have been raised about the meaning of that identity, meaning the memory theory presented by Locke. The solution presented by Locke and others are stranger than the problem itself, Butler states. According to Butler, the reductionism of Locke is circular. Locke argues that a person is the same through the consciousness only and that the consciousness is integrated with thinking and mental operations. Personal identity, according to Locke, consists of memory and consciousnesss only. We cant talk of a personal identity beyond that. Memory is what creates personal identity through time. If you lose all your memories, you lose your personal identity. According to Butler it is to consider self-evident that that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and there cannot constitute, personal identity. And he writes . any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth which it presupposes. The argument made by Locke is, according to Butler circular and therefore invalid. Consciousness itself is successive and the self-reflection demands that the personal identity is a substance in itself. Locke says that having the same consciousness is not sufficient for being the same man, but for being the same person. Butler argues for non-determinism and the text is a criticism of Lockes memory theory. Butler writes (s 100): But though consciousness of what is past does thus ascertain our personal identity to ourselves, yet, to say that it makes personal identity, or is necessary to our being the same person, is to say, that a person has not existed a single moment, nor done one action, but what he can remember; indeed non what he reflects upon. Butler argues that the memory theory (Lockes position) is incompatible with transitivity of identity. He writes: By reflecting upon that which is my self now, and that which was my self twenty years ago, I discern they are not two, but one and the same self. Butler refers to a distinction (made by Locke) between persons and other living objects in the world, for example trees. In a proper philosophic sense of being the same a tree is not the same at time t1 and twenty years later, t2. All particles (of the tree) has changed. Locke argues that we dont need identity of substance to talk about the three. But it is just in a loose meaning we say that the tree is the same. And personal identity is clearly something else than being the same man in I physical sense, according to Butler. We have two meanings of sameness. Locke defines a person as a thinking intelligent being and personal identity as the sameness of a rational being. Joseph Butler argues that if personal identity does not require identity of substance, then it is not proper to talk about identity or sameness in a philosophical sense. The fact that we understand ourselves as personal identities and think of ourselves over long times as personal identities, are argument for non-reductionism. Therefore consciousness presupposes personal identity.

Of Identity and Of Mr. Lockes Account of Our Personal Identity, Thomas Reid Reid starts out to declare: The conviction which every man has of his identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it, without first producing some degree of insanity. To Reid identity is too simple a notion to admit of logical definition. Reid, like Butler, is a non-reductionist. He affirms the arguments laid forward by Butler and adds some more. With the Brave Officer Case he illustrates that someone can be and not be identical to some past stage. The problem can be stated as follow: A man has done two things in the past (t1 and t2) and at t2 remember t1 but when he is at t3 (now) he can only remember t2 but not t1. If memory is the criteria, we can have this kind of problem. This kind of transitivity-problem is the main argument put forward by Reid. Reid writes that a man man be, and at the same time not be, the person that did a particular action. Both Butler and Reid seams to believe that Lockes theory implies that no one exists over time. But what he actually says is that there has to be a relationship between two points via consciousness. Reid writes: If you ask a definition of identity, I confess I can give you none; it is too simple a notion to admit of logical definition: I can say it is a relation, but I cannot find words to express the specific difference between this and other relations, though I am in no danger of confounding it with any other. To Reid the thing he calls my self is indivisible. One argument he has is that when he remember things twenty years ago he doesnt only remember certain actions and occasions, he also remembers being the person who now remembers it. He also know such things as who his mother was etc which all together gives evidence of the existence of the substance which is the core of the self. A person is, Reid states, a monad. It cannot be half or in part different. While the operations of the mind changes, the thinking being itself is a monad and not changeable. A physical body has no fixed nature, but personal identity has. Reid writes: From this definition of a person, it must necessarily follow, that, while the intelligent
being continues to exist and to be intelligent, it must be the same person. To say that the intelligent being is the person, and yet that the person ceases to exist while the intelligent being continues, or that the person continues while the intelligent being ceases to exist, is to my apprehension a manifest contradiction.

Reid writes that it is strange if the sameness or identity of a person should consist of something that continually changes.