Locke's Theory of Personal Identity

Philosophy ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 54 (208) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Helm
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Transitive Relation ◽  
Bodily Continuity ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

It is widely held that Locke propounded a theory of personal identity in terms of consciousness and memory. By ‘theory’ here is meant a set of necessary and sufficient conditions indicating what personal identity consists in. It is also held that this theory is open to obvious and damaging objections, so much so that it has to be supplemented in terms of bodily continuity, either because memory alone is not sufficient, or because the concept of memory is itself dependent upon considerations of bodily continuity. Alternatively it has been suggested that Locke's theory could be modified by allowing that for the purposes of personal identity ‘remember’ should be regarded as a transitive relation. So if A remembers the experiences of B but not those of C, and B remembers the experiences of C, then A, B and C can be regarded as belonging to the same unit of consciousness.

Personal Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Individual Substance ◽  
Past Time ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines John Locke's idea of personal identity by focusing on the canonical personal identity question: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of the truth of the claim that a person considered now at time t₂, whom we may call [P], is the same person as a person considered at a different past time t₁, whom we may call [Pₓ]? What has to be true if it is to be true that [Pₓ] is the same person as [P]? The canonical question assumes that “person” denotes a thing or object or substance that is a standard temporal continuant in the way that a human being or person1 is (or an immaterial soul, on most conceptions of what an immaterial soul is). The chapter considers how Locke's person differs both from human being (man) and from (individual) substance, material or immaterial, on the same ground, as well as his concept of the field of consciousness in relation to personhood.

scholarly journals Personal Identity and Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (39) ◽  
pp. 191-220
Author(s):  
Mariana Córdoba ◽  
María Marta Quintana
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Genetic Approach ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Pluralistic Perspective

The philosophical problem of personal identity –the issue of finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for a past or future being to be a certain present being– has been treated by analytical metaphysics mostly. In this framework, plenty of references to thought experiments can be found, but they exhibit no connection to practical problems and scientific outcomes. Our purpose is to involve philosophy of science in that debate, since a genetic approach regarding identity can be considered supported by contemporary scientific knowledge. In order to do that, we will focus on the Argentinian case of the approximately 500 children who were appropriated during the most recent dictatorship (1976-1983). The appropriations deprived them, precisely, of their identities, but some of them managed to be recovered thanks to Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (apm) and genetics. Our final purpose is to argue that a pluralistic perspective in philosophy of science, according to which values contribute to the very constitution of ontology science aims to describe and explain, will allow us to defend apm strategy but reject, at the same time, a reductive conception of identity.  

Locke on Being Self to My Self

2021 ◽  
pp. 118-144
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Intuitive Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Over Time

John Locke accepts that every perception gives me immediate and intuitive knowledge of my own existence. However, this knowledge is limited to the present moment when I have the perception. If I want to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions of my continued existence over time, Locke argues that it is important to clarify what “I” refers to. According to Locke, persons are thinking intelligent beings who can consider themselves as extended into the past and future and who are concerned for their happiness and accountable for their actions. I show that the concept of self that he develops in the context of his discussion of persons and personal identity is richer and more complex than the I-concept that he invokes in his version of the cogito. In the final section I turn to the reception of Locke’s view by some of his early critics and defenders, including Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, an anonymous author, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn.

The extinction time of a general birth and death process with catastrophes

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 851-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Brockwell
Keyword(s):  
Laplace Transform ◽  
Size Distribution ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Death Process ◽  
Extinction Time ◽  
Birth And Death Process ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Laplace Transform ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

The Laplace transform of the extinction time is determined for a general birth and death process with arbitrary catastrophe rate and catastrophe size distribution. It is assumed only that the birth rates satisfyλ0= 0,λj> 0 for eachj> 0, and. Necessary and sufficient conditions for certain extinction of the population are derived. The results are applied to the linear birth and death process (λj=jλ, µj=jμ) with catastrophes of several different types.

Nonlinear boundary-value problems for degenerate differential-algebraic systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-324
Author(s):  
Sergii Chuiko ◽  
Ol'ga Nesmelova
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Value Problem ◽  
Boundary Value Problems ◽  
Algebraic System ◽  
Boundary Value ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Weakly Nonlinear ◽  
Differential Algebraic System ◽  
Linear Differential ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

The study of the differential-algebraic boundary value problems, traditional for the Kiev school of nonlinear oscillations, founded by academicians M.M. Krylov, M.M. Bogolyubov, Yu.A. Mitropolsky and A.M. Samoilenko. It was founded in the 19th century in the works of G. Kirchhoff and K. Weierstrass and developed in the 20th century by M.M. Luzin, F.R. Gantmacher, A.M. Tikhonov, A. Rutkas, Yu.D. Shlapac, S.L. Campbell, L.R. Petzold, Yu.E. Boyarintsev, V.F. Chistyakov, A.M. Samoilenko, O.A. Boichuk, V.P. Yacovets, C.W. Gear and others. In the works of S.L. Campbell, L.R. Petzold, Yu.E. Boyarintsev, V.F. Chistyakov, A.M. Samoilenko and V.P. Yakovets were obtained sufficient conditions for the reducibility of the linear differential-algebraic system to the central canonical form and the structure of the general solution of the degenerate linear system was obtained. Assuming that the conditions for the reducibility of the linear differential-algebraic system to the central canonical form were satisfied, O.A.~Boichuk obtained the necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of the linear Noetherian differential-algebraic boundary value problem and constructed a generalized Green operator of this problem. Based on this, later O.A. Boichuk and O.O. Pokutnyi obtained the necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of the weakly nonlinear differential algebraic boundary value problem, the linear part of which is a Noetherian differential algebraic boundary value problem. Thus, out of the scope of the research, the cases of dependence of the desired solution on an arbitrary continuous function were left, which are typical for the linear differential-algebraic system. Our article is devoted to the study of just such a case. The article uses the original necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of the linear Noetherian differential-algebraic boundary value problem and the construction of the generalized Green operator of this problem, constructed by S.M. Chuiko. Based on this, necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of the weakly nonlinear differential-algebraic boundary value problem were obtained. A typical feature of the obtained necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of the linear and weakly nonlinear differential-algebraic boundary-value problem is its dependence on the means of fixing of the arbitrary continuous function. An improved classification and a convergent iterative scheme for finding approximations to the solutions of weakly nonlinear differential algebraic boundary value problems was constructed in the article.

On the domain of Riesz mean in the space Ls

Filomat ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-940 ◽  
Author(s):  
Medine Yeşilkayagil ◽  
Feyzi Başar
Keyword(s):  
Banach Space ◽  
Sequence Space ◽  
Double Sequence ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Double Sequences ◽  
Riesz Mean ◽  
Double Sequence Space ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Barrelled Space

Let 0 < s < ?. In this study, we introduce the double sequence space Rqt(Ls) as the domain of four dimensional Riesz mean Rqt in the space Ls of absolutely s-summable double sequences. Furthermore, we show that Rqt(Ls) is a Banach space and a barrelled space for 1 ? s < 1 and is not a barrelled space for 0 < s < 1. We determine the ?- and ?(?)-duals of the space Ls for 0 < s ? 1 and ?(bp)-dual of the space Rqt(Ls) for 1 < s < 1, where ? ? {p, bp, r}. Finally, we characterize the classes (Ls:Mu), (Ls:Cbp), (Rqt(Ls) : Mu) and (Rqt(Ls):Cbp) of four dimensional matrices in the cases both 0 < s < 1 and 1 ? s < 1 together with corollaries some of them give the necessary and sufficient conditions on a four dimensional matrix in order to transform a Riesz double sequence space into another Riesz double sequence space.

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