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Response To John Locke's Personal Identity

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Response To John Locke's Personal Identity
The accounts for personal identity, thought up by John Locke, were skeptical for several philosophers throughout time. Locke believes that we are the same person as we were yesterday because of our personal identity. He says that our personal identity is founded on consciousness namely, a continuity of conscious memories, but that the substance of the soul or body does not affect our personal identity. First, I will discuss what Locke believes to be a person. Second, I will explain why Locke believes personal identity has to be a continuous consciousness throughout time. Third, I will asses Thomas Reid's objection to Locke's account on personal identity and explain why I believe Reid's account is stronger.
Although, being a person and having …show more content…
Reid believes that personal identity consists of two things: 1) trying to get a clear interpretation what identity is 2) trying to get a clear interpretation on what a persons is. He thinks that identity is a perfectly clear notion, and is indefinable. Reid's first criticism rest on him interpreting Locke's definition that a person is a subject of thought, which Reid believes is implying that a person is a thinking substance. Reid criticizes Locke's response to the questions that are formed from interrupted consciousness, and that it is possible for a person to be "transferred from one intelligent being to another," or for "two or twenty intelligent beings to be the same person"(Locke). Reid's criticism is not that the cases of transfer or disruption are incongruous, although he does think they are. Instead, that the possibility of a person being the same without thinking the same, as the Memory Theory so blantly allows is contradictory with Locke's interpretation of a person as a thinking being . Reid then concludes this as an absurdity in the Memory Theory. Another criticism Reid uses is the case of the Brave Officer. For this case Reid states: "Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard,
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