Personal Identity in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Abstract

I now wish to show that the simplicity argument forms a major part of the contextual background of discussions concerned with personal identity in the 17th and 18th centuries and that the important examinations of the rules for the determination of moral identity occur in relation to it. Indeed, the philosophic conception of personal identity and the criteria necessary and sufficient for its establishment are completely 17th and 18th century problems, which first find an explicit formulation in Locke’s revolutionary chapter in the Essay, specifically dealing with the standard of identities of individual things. To be sure, there are already traces in Cudworth of an anticipation in this direction, but the implications are not followed out in his work. Plotinus, who influences Cudworth at every turn, had long ago emphasized that awareness depends on a “stably identical soul” (Enn., IV, 7, 5). For Cudworth, as for almost the entire Christian tradition, it is because of “personal identity,” in the form of an individual’s immortal soul, that ultimately a man can be justly punished or rewarded, in the afterlife by God. But the criteria pertaining to the permanence of the soul or self are simply assumed and hence remain unexamined. And throughout Western philosophy this had been the case.