Over the course of the semester, we’ll be hearing about, and sometimes reading texts from, a number of authors. I thought it might help you to have a map of some of the most influential people writing on our topic, who we’ll be encountering a number of times:
These are different pictures of what kind of thing you are — where you are assumed to be a person, at any rate right now. It’s controversial whether you are essentially a person or not. (And as we saw, also controversial what exactly being a person involves.)
One family of views identifies you with a particular soul, understood to be a non-physical substance that is where some or all of your mental activity takes place. Historical advocates of this view include Clarke, Butler, and Reid, and perhaps Descartes (more on Descartes below).
One family of views identifies you instead with some kind of physically-defined substance, like a brain or a body or a “human animal” or biological organism. A prominent contemporary defender of these views is Eric Olson.
A third family of views identifies you instead with something like a chain of memories or persisting personality traits. We’ll spend a lot of time developing these views as we proceed. Locke was the first philosopher to defend these views; they are sometimes called Lockean views, or memory-based views, or psychological continuity views. From the above list, Hazlitt also advocated such a view; and in the 20th and 21st centuries, views like this were defended by Sydney Shoemaker and by Perry, and in some ways also by Parfit. (Also by these other philosophers, not listed above: Quinton, Grice, David Lewis.)
Believing in souls doesn’t force one to hold a type 1, soul-based theory of personal identity. In particular, Locke thought that souls might exist, but that even if they did, we weren’t identical to them. Another kind of view would be if one thought souls existed, but that we weren’t identical to the souls themselves, but rather to a union or combination of a soul plus a body. (In the van Inwagen reading we looked at, he called this an “aggregate.”) Then one couldn’t exist if the body were destroyed, because the combination wouldn’t exist anymore. You could think of this kind of view as a hybrid of views of type 1 and views of type 2.
There is controversy among scholars about whether Descartes is best thought of as having this hybrid view, or whether he’s best thought of as instead having a type 1 view. Descartes definitely talked about unions of souls and bodies, and he thought that as we actually are, our bodies are parts of us. But it’s controversial whether he thought that we could continue to exist without our bodies, as disembodied souls. Perhaps our bodies are just accidental parts of us, like our hair or a corneal implant. Not part of our essential nature/identity.