Personal Identity

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how, in the second section of his "Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immorality", John Perry considers the difficulties of attempting to arrive at a definition of identity that places it within a specific locus or essential point, such as body, mind, or soul. It looks at how Perry has the interlocutors in his dialogue raise several fundamentally large concerns with such essentialist notions of identity and shows the ways in which such notions of personal identity limit the concept such that the "idea" of personal identity becomes quite different then the way it is practically viewed.

From the Paper:

"Perhaps a better basis for identity is that of memory. What creates a sense of identity is when we know that parts or stages of a thing a historically linked to earlier parts or stages of thing. Thus, we say that a child and a man are the same person (even though they look and act completely different) because the child grows by stages into the man. Thus, our definition of identity should probably account for this fact. In the case of identity for people, memory is an excellent basis for this understanding of identity. Thus, we can argue a person is the person as he used to be because he has memories of his previous states."

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