Locke's Person is a Relation
John Locke added a chapter called ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694) [hereafter E or Essay] in which he presented a revolutionary account of persons and personal identity. Chapter II.xxvii proved to be an immensely important contribution to the philosophical scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and remains the focus of a substantial and growing body of commentary. Within the abundant literature on Locke’s views on personhood, a number of contemporary accounts endeavour to answer a seemingly simple question— what is Locke’s person? Locke gives no explicit answer but offers three possibilities. ‘Complex ideas’, Locke writes, ‘may be all reduced under these three Heads’ (E, II.xxi.3) and these three are: modes, substances and relations.