Phil 86: Timeline of Authors

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:

• [1?] Rene Descartes was a French philosopher (who wrote in Latin and French) in the mid 1600s
• [3] John Locke was an English philosopher who wrote in the late 1600s
• [1] Samuel Clarke was an English minister and philosopher who wrote in the early 1700s
• [1] Joseph Butler was an English bishop and philosopher who wrote in the early/mid 1700s
• [?] David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who wrote in the mid 1700s
• [1] Thomas Reid was a Scottish philosopher who wrote in the mid/late 1700s
• [3?] William Hazlitt was an English essayist, critic, and philosopher who wrote in the early 1800s
• [?] Bernard Williams was a 20th century English philosopher who began writing on personal identity in the mid 1950s. He died about twenty years ago.
• [3?] Derek Parfit was another 20th century English philosopher. He died in 2017.
• [3] Sydney Shoemaker was a 20th century American philosopher. He was an undergrad teacher of mine, and died in 2022. (There’s also another philosopher, David Shoemaker, who writes on personal identity and authored one of our introductory reading selections. They’re not related.)
• [3] John Perry was a 20th century American philosopher. He’s still alive but retired from teaching. He authored the Dialogue we’ll be reading, and also edited the collection we’ll be reading some articles from.

Main Families of Theories of Personal Identity

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.)

1. 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).

2. 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.

3. 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.