Identity and Personal Identity

Abstract

It is clearly preferable to provide at least a sketch of a general theory of identity, of which the account I will develop for personal identity will be a special case, rather than merely to give an ad hoc solution to the latter problem. Indeed, the impossibility of extending a putative account of the identity of persons to the identity of chairs or tigers would in itself be a prima facie argument against that proposal. For this reason I shall begin with a brief comparison of some of the different relations we call 'identity'. However, there is no need for a complete consideration of the general questions about identity, some aspects of which are simply beyond the scope of this paper. Thus, for example, little attention need be paid to identity at a point in time; as an explication of this we can uncritically accept 'Leibniz's Law' as it is generally understood, so that 'a = b' is logically equivalent to '(F) (Fa F Fb)' (provided that the quantification is restricted to referentially transparent F). What is our prime concern is to examine the contention of Hume, in what is essentially a corollary of Leibniz's Law, that