This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also (...) takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us. (shrink)

Locke’s account of personal identity has been highly influential because of its emphasis on a psychological criterion. The same consciousness is required for being the same person. It is not so clear, however, exactly what Locke meant by ‘consciousness’ or by ‘having the same consciousness’. Interpretations vary: consciousness is seen as identical to memory, as identical to a first personal appropriation of mental states, and as identical to a first personal distinctive experience of the qualitative features of one’s own thinking. (...) There is wide agreement, however, that Locke’s theory of personal identity is meant to complement his moral and theological commitments to a system of divine punishment and reward in an afterlife. But these commitments seem to require also a metaphysical criterion, and Locke is insistent that it cannot be substance. The difficulty reconciling the psychological and metaphysical requirements of the theory has led, at worst, to charges of incoherence and, at best, to a slew of interpretations, none of which is widely accepted. (shrink)

Ted Sider aptly and concisely states the self-visitation paradox thus: 'Suppose I travel back in time and stand in a room with my sitting 10-year-old self. I seem to be both sitting and standing, but how can that be?' (2001, 101). I will explore a relativist resolution of this paradox offered by, or on behalf of, endurantists.1 It maintains that the sitting and the standing are relative to the personal time or proper time of the time traveler and is intended (...) to yield the result that Ted is sitting at a certain initial personal/proper time but is not standing relative to that time. Similarly, it is also supposed to yield that Ted is standing relative to a later personal/proper time, but not sitting relative to that .. (shrink)

Where Terence Penelhum sees a deep continuity between John Locke's theory of ideas and David Hume's theory of perceptions, I argue that the two philosophers disagree over some fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind. While Locke treats ideas as imagistic objects that we recognize as such by a special kind of inner consciousness, Hume thinks that we do not normally recognize the imagistic content of our perceptions, and instead unselfconsciously take ourselves to sense a shared public world. My disagreement (...) with Penelhum over Hume's debt to Locke helps to explain our disagreement over the nature of Hume's scepticism. (shrink)

Aristotle, Dignāga, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Brentano, Sartre and many others are right about the nature of conscious awareness: all such awareness comports—somehow carries within itself—awareness of itself . This is a necessary condition of awareness being awareness at all: no ‘higher-order’ account of what makes conscious states conscious can be correct. But is very paradoxical: it seems to require that awareness be somehow already present, in such a way as to be available to itself as object of awareness, in order (...) to be constituted as awareness in the first place. Can anything relate to itself in this way? Can there be a relation that is necessarily one-term, reflexive, non-logical , concretely realizable, dynamically real, such that its holding is a necessary condition of the existence of the thing it holds of? It helps to consider the thought this very thought is puzzling. Many accept the reality of the kind of awareness of awareness posited in and , and think it must be not only ‘pre-reflective’ and ‘non-positional’, but also irrelational or non-intentional. But perhaps such awareness of awareness can be fully relational and fully intentional, and can be legitimately said to be its own object or content, even while being pre-reflective and non-positional. (shrink)

Locke defines knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Nevertheless, he claims that we know particular things: the identity of our ideas, our own existence, and the existence of external objects. Although much has been done to reconcile the definition of knowledge with our knowledge of external objects, there is virtually nothing in the scholarship when it comes to knowing ideas or our own existence. I fill in this gap by arguing that perceptions of ideas are (...) complex mental states that convey propositional knowledge due to agreeing elements therein. (shrink)