John Locke on Personal Identity: Memory, Consciousness and Concernment

These questions come to our minds whenever we turn to the discussion of “Personal Identity”, “Are you the same person, you were a year ago”, or “Are you the same person now as we were working together last night”? “How do we persist over time” and “Is there a life after death?” Many philosophers have advanced diverse theories to try and answer questions like these. In 1690 famous empiricist John Locke’s famous work “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (Locke 1690) [1] presented a theory of personal identity which was the beginning of the modern discussion of these issues. According to Locke, the identity of a person is preserved with the identity of their consciousness, which means, one’s personal identity extends only so far as their own consciousness. Thus, he advocates that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity and that it only “Depends on consciousness, not on substance”. More explicitly stated, a present person is identical to a past one only insofar as she or he remembers, or it is possible for her or him to remember herself or himself to thinking and acting in the past. But Locke’s theory has been scrutinized, debated, and rejected by his contemporaries and modern philosophers for many centuries, many of whom concluded that consciousness and memory is a necessary condition of personal identity and many of whom rejects the notion of memory to identify a person’s identity. Two historically significant objections were filed in the eighteenth century, one by Thomas Reid and the other by Joseph Butler. Both were criticized that if Locke’s memory theory of personal identity is possible then numerical identity is not possible. Thomas Reid in his work “Essays on the Intellectual Power of Man” (Reid 1785) [2] objects that Locke’s theory of personal identity lacks “Transitive Relation”. Also, Butler’s influential dissertation “Of Personal Identity,” appended to “The Analogy of Religion” in 1736 (Butler 1875) [3] objects that Locke’s theory of personal identity is “Circular” (added italics). So, besides their criticisms and objections, I want to rebuild in my paper the position of Locke’s theory of personal identity with “consciousness” and “concernment”.