² The most well known formulations of the inconsistency objection are found in Berkeley's Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher (in Philosophical Writings, (ed.) Clarke, D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1732/2008)Google Scholar and Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (ed.) Brookes, D. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1785/2002)Google Scholar. The circularity objection is standardly attributed to Butler (in the First Appendix (First Dissertation), in The Analogy of Religion (2nd ed., London: Knapton, 1736)Google Scholar. It was, however, stated by Sergeant in 1697, and Sergeant adapted it from a debate between South and Sherlock that was well known in Butler's time, in which South (1693) made it validly against Sherlock (1690). See Thiel ‘Personal Identity’ (1998), 875–7, 898. Garrett also argues that both objections fail (‘Locke on Personal Identity, Consciousness, and “Fatal Errors”’, Philosophical Topics 31 (2003), 95–125 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

³ Thiel uses self as the uncommitted term, in effect, and successfully makes the key points about Locke in this way, but the term is not ideal given that Locke uses it interchangeably with person in 2.27.

⁴ ‘The mind’ is another candidate term, given Locke's use of it (see e.g. §§13, 23), but this choice would cause other unclarities. As for rational being, it is identified with person in §9 and with thinking being in §8.

⁵ It may (somewhat confusingly) be rephrased as the question of which Person S is considered at some particular time, or (slightly less confusingly) as the question of which forensic Person S is at some particular time.

⁶ Grice agrees: consciousness ‘for Locke means “consciousness of … as one's own”’ (‘Personal identity’, Mind 50 (1941), 341 Google Scholar).

⁷ For a qualification see Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity (2014), 38–9.The general notion of concern or concernment is taken as given, and the scope of the special restricted notion – capital ‘C’ Concernment – is fixed by reference to Consciousness. The effect of the restriction is clear: whatever one's wider concerns, one is only Concerned for oneself. Locke had already tied concernment tightly to the notion of Personal identity in the first edition of the Essay: ‘if we take wholly away all consciousness of our actions and sensations, especially of pleasure and pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place personal identity’ (2.1.11). He has it always in mind that one's eternal fate subsequent to the Day of Judgement must always be one's greatest Concern(ment).

⁸ This may be doubted, for it implies that Locke is dramatically extending the then standard notion of consciousness, which restricted consciousness to knowledge of one's own mental goings-on. See further n. 25 below; see also Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity (2014), 31–2, 39n.

⁹ If one capitalizes the word concernment in the diagram, so that it represents Lockean Concernment, the outer circle shrinks on Locke's view to become identical to the field of Consciousness circle.

¹⁰ Locke uses ‘thought’ in the Cartesian sense to cover all conscious mental goings on, as this passage shows (see also n. 25 below); I'll use the word ‘experience’ instead. Note also that Locke takes ‘action’ to cover mental goings on as well as larger-scale bodily actions (it covers anything that is morally assessable).

¹¹ Coined, as far I know, by Shoemaker, Sydney (‘Persons and Their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), 269–85)Google Scholar. The difference between remembering something from the inside and remembering it only from the outside is the difference between remembering falling out of the boat, the water rushing up to meet you, and so on (memory from the inside) and remembering that you fell out of the boat, something that might be all that you have left in the way of memory of the event, and something that someone other than you might equally well remember (memory from the outside).

¹² Can one be responsible for a past action that one remembers that one did, although one no long remembers doing it from the inside? It may be thought that Locke can't allow this, because he says that Consciousness of a past action requires being able to ‘repeat the idea of [the] past action with the same consciousness [one] had of it at first’ (§10), which requires rich ‘from-the-insideness’. To this extent his theory seems to give a wrong result, for one can feel responsible for an action that one knows one did although one no longer has any memory of doing it from the inside. One can accommodate the case by arguing that the mere fact that one still feels responsible for it shows that one is still Concerned in it, Conscious of it, in the required way.

¹³ §25. It's not helpful to take this simply as a huge understatement on Locke's part, i.e. as the claim that we are not at any given time occurrently Conscious of a great part most of our past actions.

¹⁴ I'm putting aside the point that Reid wrongly takes Locke to mean ‘memory’ by ‘consciousness’.

¹⁵ In Locke on Personal Identity I raise the question of how repentance can change one's field of responsibility. Note that Butler's addition of ‘indeed none but what he reflects upon’ is particularly aggressive (and stupid).

¹⁶ Note that Locke is using ‘ourselves’ (‘our selves’) in a sense directly related to his use of the word ‘self’, not in some more indeterminate or generic way. To quote more fully from §25: ‘Thus any part of our bodies, vitally united to that, which is conscious in us, makes a part of our selves: but upon separation from the vital union, by which that consciousness is communicated, that, which a moment since was part of our selves, is now no more so, than a part of another man's self is a part of me: and ’tis not impossible, but in a little time may become a real part of another person’ (§25).

¹⁷ When Locke says that ‘anything united to the … present thinking being … by a consciousness of former actions, makes also a part of the same self, which is the same both then and now’ (§25) the scope of ‘anything’ is only ‘former actions’. It's not as if the material particles that made you up ten years ago when you performed a certain action of which you are now conscious are (thereby) still part of the person you are now.

¹⁸ It's even more fine-grained than Parfitian psychological connectedness, which also picks and chooses. See section 13 below.

¹⁹ §17. In full the passage reads ‘that with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself, and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no farther’. It may help understanding to remove the last two commas: the present thinking being acknowledges ‘all the actions of that thing as its own as far as [its] consciousness reaches and no further’. It acknowledges the actions of that thing as its own only as far as its present consciousness reaches them.

²⁰ §24. Locke is here focusing on the case of an immaterial substance, but the point is for him quite general. Note how the ‘and’ in this passage distinguishes memory and Consciousness.

²¹ §14. Here I disagree with Garrett (‘Locke on Personal Identity, Consciousness, and “Fatal Errors”’). Note that even if one were supposed to connect with the whole forensic Person that Nestor was at the time he performed the action in question one would surely not connect forensically with any actions that he had at that time not yet performed.

²² Locke takes an orthodox Christian position in holding that we can't be said to exist as persons unless we're embodied. Like almost everyone else at the time, he agrees with Boethius that a person consists essentially of ‘soul and body, not soul and body separately’ (Boethius, De Trinitate, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolations of Philosophy (trans. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, c510), 11). A disembodied soul would not be a person. See Thiel ‘Personal Identity’ (1998), 870.

²³ In Locke on Personal Identity (2014) (pages 62–4), I argue that Locke specifies four separate conditions by the words ‘thinking’ (used in the wide Cartesian sense – see note 10), ‘intelligent’, ‘reason’, and ‘reflection’. There is no redundancy.

²⁴ Leibniz, Compare New Essays on Human Understanding, (ed. and trans. Bennett, J. and Remnant, P.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1704/1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, §34, 2.27.9.

²⁵ Some, perhaps, have supposed that Locke means something merely cognitive by the word ‘thinking’, and so has only the cognitive aspect of memory in mind when considering Consciousness of the past. As already noted, however, Locke uses ‘thinking’ in the wide Cartesian sense, as is shown by the immediate continuation of the famous passage: ‘it being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself, that which he calls self… consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, which makes every one to be, what he calls self’ (§9). It's a pity that many encounter the famous passage only lifted out of context and quoted in a truncated form.

²⁶ Such cases are found in clinical neurology; see e.g. Damasio The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999)Google Scholar, and ‘Interview’, New Scientist 165 (2000), 46–49.Google Scholar

²⁷ Note that ‘with the same consciousness it had of it at first’ makes this, at least on one reading, an implausibly strong requirement.

²⁸ See e.g. Strawson ‘“The Self”’ in Models of the Self (ed.) Gallagher, S. & Shear, J. (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1997/1999)Google Scholar, §8, ‘Against Narrativity’ in Strawson, G. Real Materialism and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004/2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, §4.

²⁹ He doesn't have much to say about what might preserve the identity of subjects of experience between death and resurrection. See further note 23.

³⁰ Here there is an interesting connection to Dainton's conception of the self: ‘a subject’, he says, ‘is essentially a continuous potential for consciousness’ (The Phenomenal Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 Google Scholar), 251); ‘the essence of subjects is the capacity to be conscious ’ (Self (London: Penguin, 2013), ch. 6).Google Scholar

³¹ Nothing can lie in the field of Consciousness of more than one person.

³² Note that this includes one's body, in Locke's account, even though Consciousness is standardly and primarily defined as a reflexive property of experience. See e.g. §11: ‘cut off a hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness, we had of its heat, cold, and other affections; and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself ’. See also §17: ‘thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so. Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person’.

³³ This is part of Locke's campaign against those of his contemporaries who argue that belief in Resurrection requires belief in an immaterial soul because personal identity between death and Resurrection requires the persistence of single continuing substance.

³⁴ And so not considered with respect to my substantial composition between t ₁ and t ₂, insofar as this involves more than the existence of the relevant actions and experiences.

³⁵ Even leaving aside the fact that he was at the time soundly flogged for doing so.

³⁶ At one point Locke imagines a thinking being losing all consciousness of its past, ‘and so as it were beginning a new account from a new period’ (§14).

³⁷ One might say, in other terms, it will be a matter of what one still identifies with in the past, where this identification is not necessarily a matter of having a positive attitude to something, nor a matter of choice or intentional action.

³⁸ Cf. Parfit Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 205–206.Google Scholar

³⁹ ‘Do an action’ seems incorrect in modern English, outside philosophy, but I follow Locke's usage.

⁴⁰ In Locke on Personal Identity (2014), I go into more detail. I also analyse the ‘fatal error’ passage in §13 of Locke's chapter. I'm grateful to Ruth Boeker and Mohan Matthen for comments on a draft of this paper, and to audiences at Reading University, the American University of Beirut, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.