Book contents
- What is a Person?
- What is a Person?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Constructing the ‘Mainline Tradition’
- Part II No God, no Soul: What Person?
- 8 Virtue, ‘Virtue’, Rights
- 9 Descartes on Soul, Self, Mind, Nature
- 10 Personal Identity from Hobbes to Locke
- 11 After Locke
- 12 Sympathy or Empathy: Richardson, Hume, Smith
- 13 Ambiguous Rousseau’s Soul and ‘Moi’
- 14 Kant’s Rational Autonomy
- Part III Toward Disabling the Person
- Part IV Persons Restored or Final Solution?
- Epilogue or Epitaph?
- Appendix The World of Rights Transformed Again
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Personal Identity from Hobbes to Locke
from Part II - No God, no Soul: What Person?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2019
- What is a Person?
- What is a Person?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Constructing the ‘Mainline Tradition’
- Part II No God, no Soul: What Person?
- 8 Virtue, ‘Virtue’, Rights
- 9 Descartes on Soul, Self, Mind, Nature
- 10 Personal Identity from Hobbes to Locke
- 11 After Locke
- 12 Sympathy or Empathy: Richardson, Hume, Smith
- 13 Ambiguous Rousseau’s Soul and ‘Moi’
- 14 Kant’s Rational Autonomy
- Part III Toward Disabling the Person
- Part IV Persons Restored or Final Solution?
- Epilogue or Epitaph?
- Appendix The World of Rights Transformed Again
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Descartes defended the existence of a barely knowable God, and his account of the soul, as we have seen, is diminished and naturalized. As we read him, we find a self-conscious ‘self’ performing a limited number of the functions of the older ‘soul’; being more or less identified with mind alone, it has lost its intrinsic connection with the physical body.1 When we turn to John Locke, often hailed as the primary constructor of the modern ‘self’ and stage-setter of debates on its nature – with those thought-experiments about multiple personalities with which we are now familiar – we find that while the voluntarist God is still there, the account of the ‘person’ is radically changed.
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- Information
- What is a Person?Realities, Constructs, Illusions, pp. 99 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019