Transition (Butler Dismissed)

This chapter examines John Locke's theory of personal identity, which he has defined in terms of the reach of consciousness in beings who qualify as persons (being in particular fully self-conscious, able to think of past and future, and “capable of a law”). It starts with the notion that a person is an object of a certain sort, and must exemplify a certain sort of temporal continuity, if it is to continue to exist. Locke assumes that any candidate person has such continuity. The chapter also considers which parts of a subject of experience's continuous past are features or aspects or parts of the person that it now is before concluding with an analysis of Joseph Butler's incorrect identification of consciousness with memory in his objection to Locke's argument that a person can survive a change in its thinking substance even if its thinking substance is immaterial.