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Essays on Personal Identity

The theme of Personal Identity is of paramount importance as it delves into the essence of what makes us unique individuals. It encompasses a wide array of factors including culture, language, gender, family dynamics, religion, and personal experiences that together shape our sense of self. Exploring personal identity helps in understanding the complex interplay between individual traits and societal influences, fostering a deeper comprehension of oneself and others.

Writing essays on Personal Identity is crucial for several reasons:

• It encourages self-reflection and introspection, allowing individuals to explore and articulate their understanding of their own identity.
• It promotes empathy and cultural awareness by examining how diverse backgrounds and experiences contribute to the mosaic of society.
• Essays on this topic can contribute to critical discussions about the role of external factors, such as social media and globalization, in shaping personal identity.
• They offer a platform for discussing pressing issues related to identity, such as gender identity and the impact of mental health, in a nuanced and informed manner.
• Writing about personal identity challenges writers to consider the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of identity in the modern world.

List of Popular Personal Identity Essay Topics

• Exploring the Impact of Culture on Personal Identity Formation
• Uncovering the Layers of Personal Identity
• The Role of Language in Shaping Individual Identity
• Personal Identity in the Digital Age: Social Media and Self-Perception
• Gender Identity: Navigating the Landscape of Self-Discovery
• The Impacts of Racism and Identity in James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son"
• The Influence of Family Dynamics on the Development of Personal Identity
• Religion and Spirituality: Their Contribution to Personal Identity
• The Interplay Between Personal Identity and Mental Health
• Personal Growth and Identity: The Journey Through Life Transitions

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Understanding The Significance of Personal Identity

What personal identity means to me, what you call home: a personal identity of home, understanding of the meaning of identity, how to improve your relationship with yourself, the importance and role of the social identity in my life, the issue of equality and self identity in james baldwin's "sonny's blues", negative effect of social media on identity in adolescents, components of our identity by tatum, double identity by jeanne wakatsuki houston: a complex exploration, the problem of identity in "sonny’s blues" and 'a raisin in the sun", the influence of parents on my identity, the topic of identity in the movie the return of martin guerre, the concept of identity by john locke, the concept of gender identity from sociological and physiological perspective, the quest for identity in 'the joy luck club' by amy tan, the maze of identity: quinn’s position in "city of glass", the construction of kathy's identity in "never let me go", unwelcomed identities explored by kincaid and anzaldua, identity construction in alison bechdel’s "fun home".

Personal identity refers to the unique and enduring characteristics, traits, beliefs, values, and experiences that define an individual's sense of self. It encompasses the conscious awareness of one's own existence and the recognition of being distinct from others. Personal identity is shaped by a combination of genetic factors, social interactions, cultural influences, and personal choices.

The concept of personal identity, often explored in philosophy and psychology, has a complex and multifaceted origin. The origins can be traced back to ancient civilizations and philosophical traditions that pondered the nature of the self. One influential school of thought is found in ancient Greece, particularly in the works of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Plato proposed the idea of an immortal soul that persists through various incarnations, while Aristotle emphasized the importance of the mind and memory in shaping personal identity. In the realm of Eastern philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism have also contributed to the understanding of personal identity. Hinduism embraces the concept of reincarnation, where individuals' identities persist across multiple lives. Buddhism challenges the notion of a fixed and enduring self, suggesting that personal identity is impermanent and constantly evolving. The concept of personal identity further developed during the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th centuries. Philosophers such as John Locke introduced the idea that personal identity is rooted in consciousness and memory. Locke argued that the continuity of memory and experiences over time determines one's sense of self.

Psychological Continuity: This theory, popularized by John Locke, emphasizes the importance of psychological attributes, such as memory, consciousness, and personality traits, in defining personal identity. According to this view, a person's identity is based on the continuity of their mental states and experiences over time. Biological Continuity: This theory emphasizes the role of biological factors in personal identity. It posits that an individual's identity is primarily determined by their physical characteristics and genetic makeup. Biological continuity theorists argue that bodily continuity is essential for personal identity. Narrative Identity: This theory, influenced by narrative psychology, asserts that personal identity is constructed through the stories we tell about ourselves. Our sense of self is shaped by the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences, relationships, and life events. Bundle Theory: This theory, advocated by David Hume, challenges the notion of a unified and continuous self. According to bundle theory, personal identity is a collection of interconnected mental and physical attributes, thoughts, sensations, and experiences. There is no underlying substance that remains constant over time. Social Identity: This theory emphasizes the role of social interactions, cultural contexts, and group affiliations in shaping personal identity. It suggests that identity is not solely an individual construct but is influenced by social norms, roles, and relationships.

Physical Appearance: Our physical characteristics, such as our body shape, facial features, and unique traits, play a significant role in our personal identity. They contribute to how we are recognized and perceived by others. Psychological Traits: Personal identity is intertwined with our psychological traits, including our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, values, and personality traits. These aspects shape our perspectives, behavior patterns, and the way we interact with the world. Memories and Experiences: The accumulation of memories and life experiences forms an integral part of personal identity. Our unique collection of past events, relationships, achievements, and challenges shape our individual narrative and shape who we are. Cultural and Social Identity: Our personal identity is influenced by the cultural and social contexts we are part of. Factors such as nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, and social roles contribute to our sense of belonging and shape our identity. Interests and Passions: Our hobbies, interests, and passions also contribute to our personal identity. The things we enjoy, the activities we pursue, and the skills we develop become integral parts of who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Relationships and Connections: The relationships we form with others, including family, friends, and communities, have a profound impact on our personal identity. Our interactions and connections shape our sense of belonging, social roles, and the way we relate to others. Future Goals and Aspirations: Personal identity is not solely based on the past and present but also encompasses our future aspirations and goals. Our ambitions, dreams, and the vision we have for our lives contribute to our sense of identity and drive our actions.

1. According to a study published in the journal Science, researchers found that our sense of personal identity can be influenced by external factors, such as the opinions of others. The study showed that people were more likely to conform to a group's judgment, even if it conflicted with their own initial perceptions. 2. Research suggests that personal identity can be shaped by cultural norms and social expectations. For example, studies have shown that collectivist cultures, which prioritize the needs and goals of the group over individual desires, tend to have a stronger emphasis on social identity and conformity. 3. Personal identity can be influenced by language. Linguistic relativity theory suggests that the language we speak affects our perception and understanding of the world, including our sense of self. Different languages may have unique ways of expressing personal identity, which can shape how individuals perceive themselves. 4. Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain's neural networks play a crucial role in forming and maintaining personal identity. The connections between different regions of the brain contribute to our cognitive processes, emotions, and memories, all of which shape our sense of self. 5. Identity crisis is a phenomenon where individuals experience uncertainty or confusion about their personal identity. It is often associated with major life transitions or events, such as adolescence, career changes, or cultural shifts. Identity crisis can lead to self-reflection and a reevaluation of one's values, goals, and beliefs. 6. Personal identity can evolve and change over time. This concept, known as identity fluidity, suggests that individuals may experience shifts in their self-perception due to personal growth, new experiences, or changing social and cultural contexts.

The topic of personal identity holds immense significance as it explores fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and individuality. Understanding personal identity helps us unravel the complexities of human cognition, emotions, and behavior, enabling us to gain insights into ourselves and others. Exploring personal identity in an essay provides an opportunity to delve into the intricacies of self-perception, the formation of identity, and the factors that shape our sense of self. It allows for a critical examination of how personal identity is influenced by cultural, social, and psychological factors, offering a deeper understanding of human diversity and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Additionally, studying personal identity facilitates introspection and self-reflection, encouraging individuals to explore their own beliefs, values, and aspirations. It prompts us to question the stability and continuity of our identities, opening up avenues for personal growth and self-actualization. Furthermore, personal identity has implications in various fields, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, and neuroscience. By exploring this topic, we can draw interdisciplinary connections and foster a holistic understanding of human nature and the complexities of the human experience.

1. Shoemaker, D., & Tobia, K. (2019). Personal identity. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3198090) 2. Olson, E. (2016). Personal identity. Science fiction and philosophy: From time travel to superintelligence, 69-90. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118922590.ch7) 3. Swinburne, R. G. (1973, January). Personal identity. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Vol. 74, pp. 231-247). Aristotelian Society, Wiley. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544858) 4. Glover, J. (1988). I: The philosophy and psychology of personal identity. (https://philpapers.org/rec/GLOITP) 5. Floridi, L. (2011). The informational nature of personal identity. Minds and machines, 21, 549-566. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6) 6. Schechtman, M. (2005). Personal identity and the past. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 12(1), 9-22. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/186014/summary) 7. Shoemaker, D. W. (2007). Personal identity and practical concerns. Mind, 116(462), 317-357. (https://academic.oup.com/mind/article-abstract/116/462/317/1083800) 8. Garrett, B. (2002). Personal identity and self-consciousness. Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203015667/personal-identity-self-consciousness-brian-garrett) 9. Luckmann, T., & Berger, P. (1964). Social mobility and personal identity. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 5(2), 331-344. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-sociology-archives-europeennes-de-sociologie/article/abs/social-mobility-and-personal-identity/3A597A028214E9C7F6BD6EA77CFBC881) 10. McLean, K. C., & Syed, M. (2015). Personal, master, and alternative narratives: An integrative framework for understanding identity development in context. Human Development, 58(6), 318-349. (https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/445817)

Relevant topics

• Social Justice
• Discourse Community
• Self Identity
• Effects of Social Media
• Sociological Imagination
• American Identity
• Gender Stereotypes

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Locke on Personal Identity

John Locke (1632–1704) added the chapter in which he treats persons and their persistence conditions (Book 2, Chapter 27) to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1694, only after being encouraged to do so by William Molyneux (1692–1693). [ 1 ] Nevertheless, Locke’s treatment of personal identity is one of the most discussed and debated aspects of his corpus. Locke’s discussion of persons received much attention from his contemporaries, ignited a heated debate over personal identity, and continues to influence and inform the debate over persons and their persistence conditions. This entry aims to first get clear on the basics of Locke’s position, when it comes to persons and personal identity, before turning to areas of the text that continue to be debated by historians of philosophy working to make sense of Locke’s picture of persons today. It then canvases how Locke’s discussion of persons was received by his contemporaries, and concludes by briefly addressing how those working in metaphysics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have responded to Locke’s view—giving the reader a glimpse of Locke’s lasting impact and influence on the debate over personal identity.

1. Locke on Persons and Personal Identity: The Basics

2. locke on persons: what’s up for debate, 3. the early modern reception of locke’s picture of persons, 4. locke’s lasting impact on the personal identity debate, primary literature by locke, other historical literature, contemporary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Locke’s most thorough discussion of the persistence (or diachronic identity) of persons can be found in Book 2, Chapter 27 of the Essay (“Of Identity and Diversity”), though Locke anticipates this discussion as early as Book 1, Chapter 4, Section 5, and Locke refers to persons in other texts, including the Second Treatise of Government . The discussion of persons and their persistence conditions also features prominently in Locke’s lengthy exchange with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1697–1699).

Locke begins “Of Identity and Diversity” by first getting clear on the principle of individuation, and by setting out what some have called the place-time-kind principle—which stipulates that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time, and no individual can be in two different places at the same time (L-N 2.27.1). [ 2 ] With some of the basics of identity in place, Locke posits that before we can determine the persistence conditions for atoms, masses of matter, plants, animals, men, or persons, we must first know what we mean by these terms. In other words, before we can determine what makes atoms, masses of matter, plants, animals, men, or persons the same over time, we must pin down the nominal essences—or general ideas—for these kinds. Of this Locke says,

’Tis not therefore Unity of Substance that comprehends all sorts of Identity , or will determine it in every Case: But to conceive, and judge of it aright, we must consider what Idea the Word it is applied to stands for…. (L-N 2.27.7)

That we must define a kind term before determining the persistence conditions for that kind is underscored in Locke’s definition of “person”. Locke starts off by saying,

This being premised to find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what Person stands for….

He goes on,

which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places…. (L-N 2.27.9)

A person for Locke is thus the kind of entity that can think self reflectively, and think of itself as persisting over time.

Locke additionally asserts that persons are agents. For Locke “person” is a

…Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. (L-N 2.27.26)

Persons are therefore not just thinking intelligent beings that can reason and reflect, and consider themselves as the same thinking things in different times and places, but also entities that can be held accountable for their actions. It is because persons can think of themselves as persisting over time that they can, and do, plan ahead, with an eye toward the punishment or reward that may follow.

Just after Locke defines “person”, he begins to elucidate what makes any person the same person over time. He asserts that

…consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self . (L-N 2.27.9)

Consciousness is what distinguishes selves, and thus,

…in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person ; it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done. (L-N 2.27.9)

After the initial assertion that the diachronic identity of persons consists in sameness of consciousness, Locke goes on to use various imaginary cases to drive this point home.

The imaginary cases that Locke employs are not dissimilar to ancient cases, such as the Ship of Theseus, reported by Plutarch. In this case, we are asked to imagine a ship that has slowly had its planks replaced with new ones. The intuition Plutarch’s case is intended to test is whether, at the end (when the ship has an entirely new material constitution), we have the same ship as before. Likewise, Locke is using cases to test readers’ intuitions about persistence and identity. But it is arguable that Locke is the first to devise such cases to specifically test readers’ intuitions about persons and the conditions under which they are the same. Locke is thus carving out a new conceptual space through such imaginary cases. A few of these will be outlined and discussed in what follows.

In the “prince and the cobbler” passage, or L-N 2.27.15, Locke asks the reader to imagine the soul of a prince entering and informing the body of a cobbler, taking all of its “princely thoughts” with it. In this scenario, the person called “prince” ends up persisting in the man identified as the “cobbler”, because the prince’s consciousness goes along with the prince’s soul. Just after Locke describes this scenario, he says,

I know that in the ordinary way of speaking, the same Person, and the same Man, stand for one and the same thing. And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak, as he pleases, and to apply what articulate Sounds to what Ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases. But yet when we will enquire, what makes the same Spirit, Man , or Person , in our Minds; and having resolved with our selves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine, in either of them, or the like, when it is the same , and when not. (L-N 2.27.15)

Through the “prince and the cobbler” passage it not only becomes clear that a person goes where their consciousness goes, but also that Locke distinguishes between the term “man” (which is synonymous with “human being”) and “person”.

Other scenarios that Locke conjures, such as the “waking and sleeping Socrates” case (L-N 2.27.19), make clear that even if an individual remains the same man, he may not persist as the same person. Here Locke says,

If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness , Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen. (L-N 2.27.19)

If Socrates has a different consciousness by day than he does by night, then waking Socrates ought not be punished for what sleeping Socrates does. This is because although Socrates is the same man by day as he is by night, he is a different person by day than he is at night (and moral responsibility lies with persons, according to Locke). Thus while the identity of consciousness determines the identity of person, the identity of persons and the identity of men come apart for Locke—or at least they can . [ 3 ]

Locke additionally distinguishes between persons and souls. There is evidence for this in L-N 2.27.13. Here Locke claims,

But yet to return to the Question before us, it must be allowed, That if the same consciousness … can be transferr’d from one thinking Substance to another, it will be possible, that two thinking Substances may make but one Person.

If consciousness can actually be transferred from one soul to another, then a person can persist, despite a change in the soul to which her consciousness is annexed. Thus if a reader’s soul switches out as she progresses from the start of L-N 2.27 to the end, so long as the reader’s consciousness remains the same, she remains the same person, according to Locke.

On top of this, Locke asserts that even if an individual has the same soul, he may fail to be the same person. Locke makes this point in L-N 2.27.14, 23, and 24. In the “day and night-man” passage, or 2.27.23, Locke asks the reader to imagine “…two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same Body, the one constantly by Day, the other by Night” (L-N 2.27.23). Locke goes on to suggest that the “… Day and the Night-man ” are “as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato ” (L-N 2.27.23). Locke then makes clear that this is the case even if day and night-man share the same soul:

For granting that the thinking Substance in Man must be necessarily suppos’d immaterial, ‘tis evident, that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again, as appears in the forgetfulness Men often have of their past Actions, and the Mind many times recovers the memory of a past consciousness, which it had lost for twenty Years together. Make these intervals of Memory and Forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by Day and Night, and you have two Persons with the same immaterial Spirit, as much as in the former instance two Persons with the same Body. So that self is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance…but only by identity of consciousness. (L-N 2.27.23)

Just as the “waking and sleeping Socrates” passage, L-N 2.27.23 shows that there can be a change of person due to a change in consciousness, and this is the case even though there is no change in man. But, what Locke also makes clear through L-N 2.27.23 is that there can be a change of person even though there is no change in soul. Thus while many philosophers (including Plato, Rene Descartes, Samuel Clarke, etc.) think that one cannot be a person unless one has an immaterial soul, and the identity of persons rests in the identity of souls, Locke makes the bold move of pulling persons and souls apart.

In addition to this, Locke calls the substantial nature of souls into question. Locke takes thought to be immaterial, and while Locke contends that the immaterial cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the material, Locke is not committed to substance dualism, when it comes to finite thinkers. This is because Locke thinks substratum—or the substance that underlies and supports any particular substance’s qualities—is impossible for finite minds to penetrate. Additionally there is nothing in the concepts “thought” and “matter” that allows us to deduce that one excludes the other, and God could have superadded the ability to think to formerly inert systems of matter. In Locke’s picture, we cannot know whether the substance (or substratum) that underlies thinking and willing is different from the substance (or substratum) that underlies being solid and white, or yellow and malleable. Locke’s official position on the substantial nature of finite thinkers is therefore one of agnosticism.

This section outlines some of the areas of Locke’s text, and aspects of Locke’s view, that continue to be debated by historians of philosophy working to make sense of Locke’s picture of persons and their persistence conditions today. As will soon become clear, there is disagreement about almost every aspect of Locke’s discussion of persons, and even some of what has been presented thus far betrays a particular interpretive framework.

One of the overarching questions asked about Locke’s Essay is how much it includes metaphysical exploration. Some think that Locke’s project is exclusively epistemological, citing (among other passages) the following as evidence for their view: In the Epistle to the Reader , Locke describes himself as an “underlabourer”. Locke then goes on to say,

This, therefore being my Purpose to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent; I shall not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind; or trouble my self to examine, wherein its Essence consists, or by what Motions of our Spirits, or Alterations of our Bodies, we come to have any Sensation by our Organs, or any Ideas in our Understandings; and whether those Ideas do in their Formation, any, or all of them, depend on Matter, or no. These are Speculations, which, however curious and entertaining, I shall decline, as lying out of my Way, in the Design I am now upon. (L-N 1.1.2)

Under this reading, Locke is interested in determining what we can and cannot know by first determining how we come to have ideas, but what this entails is determining which activities give rise to our ideas, rather than investigating the metaphysical nature of the thinking thing wherein these activities—sensation and reflection—take place. Likewise all other explorations within the Essay eschew metaphysics.

Those who read L-N 2.27 as part of a project which is purely epistemological see the claims that Locke makes about the persistence of persons as claims about what we can know about the persistence of persons. As Lex Newman puts it,

Locke’s broader aim is to clarify the conditions under which we judge that we are numerically the same with some earlier person, not the conditions under which we strictly are the same person. (2015: 90)

Under this kind of reading, Locke’s claim that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance (L-N 2.27.10 and 23) amounts to the claim that if any person wants to determine whether they are the same, they do not look to substance to find out. The idea is that because we have such an impoverished notion of substance in general, we do not look to substratum to determine if we are the same person over time in Locke’s view.

Other scholars tend to think that although Locke sets his task in the Essay as an epistemological one, he cannot help but dabble in some metaphysics along the way. What has been presented (regarding the basics of Locke’s picture of persons) in this entry thus far falls within this interpretive camp. This is why the imaginary cases that Locke employs in L-N 2.27 have been described as giving the reader information about what makes it the case that a person is the same at time 2 as at time 1. According to this view, what Locke is giving us in L-N 2.27 are inter alia “the conditions under which we strictly are the same person”.

Nevertheless, within the interpretive camp that takes Locke to dabble in metaphysics, there is widespread debate, both at the macro and the micro level. To start with the macro level: Some who fall into this camp see Locke making metaphysical claims in various passages throughout the text . Such scholars thus see what Locke is doing in L-N 2.27 as very much in keeping with moves that he makes in other parts of the Essay (see Stuart 2013, for example). However, others see L-N 2.27—and the metaphysics Locke is doing therein—as a significant break from the methodology that Locke employs in the rest of the Essay . This is because just after Locke claims that his project in the Essay is an epistemological one (1.1.2), he makes clear that in this project, he is using the historical plain method, or roughly, the Baconian method of induction (see Nuovo forthcoming). Of this, Locke says,

…I shall imagine I have not wholly misimploy’d my self in the Thoughts I shall have on this Occasion, if, in this Historical, plain Method, I can give any Account of the Ways , whereby our Understandings come to attain those Notions of Things we have, and can set down any Measures of the Certainty of our Knowledge, or the Grounds of those perswasions, which are to be found amongst Men, so various, different, and wholly contradictory…. (L-N 1.1.2)

Those who see a tension between Locke’s discussion of personal identity and the rest of the Essay contend that the way in which Locke proceeds in L-N 2.27 not only includes metaphysics, but also a reliance on thought experiments for data. Thus, rather than surveying a number of instances, and drawing inferences from there—or utilizing the historical, plain method—as he claims to be doing throughout the Essay , Locke is doing something quite different in 2.27: He is employing imaginary cases instead (see Antonia LoLordo 2012, for example).

However, what the historical plain method amounts to for Locke, and whether Locke’s use of thought experiments in L-N 2.27 is in tension with this method is also the subject of debate. So too is whether Locke uses thought experiments in 2.27 alone . Additionally, some have questioned whether the exercises that Locke walks readers through in 2.27 count as thought experiments at all (see Kathryn Tabb 2018, for more on this). There are thus wide-ranging debates about how to best describe 2.27 and the methodologies Locke employs therein. There is also much disagreement regarding how to square these methodologies with the general description Locke gives of his project in the Essay . Moreover, this is the case even amongst those who are in agreement that Locke is doing metaphysics in 2.27.

On top of this, there are deep and long-standing micro-level debates amongst those who think Locke is giving us some metaphysics in L-N 2.27. One such debate regards the implications of Locke’s assertion that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance (2.27.10 and 23). Some scholars take Locke’s assertion that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance, and other similar claims, to be evidence that Locke is a relativist about identity (see Stuart 2013, for example). To get a sense of what this entails, it is helpful to consider the contrast case: strict identity. If a philosopher holds a strict identity theory, then she takes it that we can ask, “Is y at time 2 the same as x at time 1?” and arrive at a determinate answer. On the other hand, if a philosopher is a relativist about identity, then she asserts that in response to the former question, we have to ask “Same what?” So if we ask, “Is Socrates the same?” a relativist about identity thinks we have to specify under which sortal term we are considering Socrates. Are we thinking about Socrates as a human being, or a body, or a soul (or something else altogether)?

On top of this, the relativist about identity thinks that an entity who is of two sorts can persist according to one, while failing to persist according to the other. We might say that from one day to the next, Socrates persists as the same human being, but not as the same body. Thus when Locke says that a person can persist despite a change in substance, or a person can persist despite a change in soul, some scholars take Locke to be showing that he is a relativist about identity. Relative identity readings were rather unpopular for some time, but have experienced a resurgence as of late (see Stuart 2013).

Still, some think that attributing this kind of reading to Locke is anachronistic. Others take issue with the fact that under a relative identity reading, there is, properly speaking, just one entity described under different sorts. (What we call “Socrates” does not pick out a human being, and person, with a body and soul, but rather one thing, described in these different ways.) This is appealing for some, especially those who think that this is the only way to save Locke from violating the place-time-kind principle, which stipulates that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time. But it lacks appeal for those who take Locke to be claiming that persons and the human beings who house them (for instance) are distinct. [ 4 ]

Some scholars take Locke’s assertion that the identity of substance is neither required nor enough for the persistence of any person to be evidence that persons are modes (or attributes), rather than substances (or things themselves). Such scholars then turn to Locke’s place-time-kind principle, for further evidence for their view. They take Locke’s assertion that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time to mean that no two substances of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time. Souls are thinking substances for Locke, and if persons are substances, they would count as such. Thus, persons cannot be substances, for otherwise wherever there is a person and her soul there are two thinking substances in the same place at the same time. Those who offer mode readings additionally turn to Locke’s claim that person is a “forensic term” and Locke’s bold assertion that a demonstrative science of morality is possible as evidence that the term “person” must be a mode term, rather than a substance term. This line of interpretation is popular today (see LoLordo 2012, Mattern 1980, Uzgalis 1990), but dates back to Edmund Law (1769).

Other Locke scholars defend substance readings of Locke on persons. They turn to Locke’s claims about substance, power, and agency, to conclude that if an entity has any power whatsoever it has to be a substance. Persons have powers. Thus, persons have to be substances for Locke (for arguments along these lines, see Gordon-Roth 2015, Rickless 2015, Chappell 1990). They then have to explain what Locke means when he asserts that the identity of any person does not rest in the identity of substance. Those who do not take the relative identity path usually end up working to get clear on what Locke could mean by “substance” when he makes this claim. Many conclude that what Locke means is that the identity of any person does not depend upon the identity of the simple substances that compose or constitute her. There are numerous defenders of this position today (see Alston and Bennett 1988, Bolton 1994, Chappell 1990, and Uzgalis 1990). Thus questions about two of the most basic features of Locke’s picture of personal identity—What is Locke’s (general) view on identity?; and, What kind of entity is a person, exactly?—are the subject of ongoing debate. [ 5 ]

So too are the most clearly stated aspects of Locke’s view: the claim that persons have consciousnesses, and the accompanying assertion that sameness of person rests in sameness of consciousness. What is consciousness for Locke? What does Locke mean by “sameness of consciousness”? Answering these questions turns out to be difficult, since Locke does not say much about what he takes consciousness to be (and we only know the persistence conditions of any entity, once we get clear on the nominal essence of that entity’s kind, according to Locke). Nevertheless, answering these questions is crucial to understanding Locke’s theory of personal identity since it is consciousness centered.

Some scholars take Locke to be a strict memory theorist. In other words, consciousness just is memory for Locke. As will become clear below, this reading dates back at least as far as Thomas Reid. Of course, it is the case that the way a person extends their consciousness backward is via memory. It thus may seem as if the identity of consciousness consists in memory, or that to have the same consciousness as she who did x , one has to have a memory of doing x , under Locke’s view. Nevertheless, as Margaret Atherton points out, Locke talks at length about forgetfulness, and if consciousness just is memory, then we cannot make sense of consciousness at any given moment where a person is not invoking memory (1983: 277–278). Atherton then goes on to develop an account of consciousness that is analogous with Locke’s conception of animal “life”.

The identity of consciousness is what allows for the persistence of any person, just as the identity of life is what allows for the persistence of any animal. “If we look at Locke in this fashion”, Atherton argues,

then what he is saying is that what makes me different at this moment from any other person is that my thoughts are identical with my consciousness of them. No one else can have my consciousness any more than any organism can have my life. (Atherton 1983: 283)

A person, in Atherton’s reading of Locke, is a single center of consciousness, and so long as that single center of consciousness persists, the person persists.

Other scholars hold what is called an “appropriation reading” (see Winkler 1991, Thiel 2011, LoLordo 2012). Under this reading, what Locke means when he says that sameness of person consists in sameness of consciousness, is that any person extends back only to those mental events or acts which they take to be their own . In other words, the persistence of any person or self is best seen in terms of the “subjective constitution of the self” (Winkler 1991: 204). There might be a worry that under this kind of reading, Locke gives persons too much authority. That is, a person could deny that she is the one who committed the crime, just because she doesn’t see that act as her own. But, although the “self has a certain authority over its own constitution”, Kenneth Winkler makes clear that

it is important to realize that this authority is not consciously exerted. I do not willfully disown one act and appropriate another; instead I accept what my consciousness reveals to me. There is also a severe limit on that authority, imposed by the transitivity of identity,

which comes through, as Winkler notes, in Reid’s objection—an objection which Winkler thinks sympathetic readers of Locke can answer and which is discussed in section 3 below (Winkler 1991: 206).

From these treatments it is still difficult to discern what consciousness is for Locke, however. Shelley Weinberg works to give a robust picture of Locke’s conception of consciousness in her recent book (2016). According to Weinberg, Locke uses the term “consciousness” in two different ways:

…Locke seems to see consciousness as (1) a mental state inseparable from an act of perception by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving , and (2) the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states . (Weinberg 2016: 153)

The former is a momentary psychological state that allows for what Weinberg calls

a momentary subjective experience that the self presently perceiving is the same as the self that remembers having once had a past thought or action

and captures the first-person experience of persisting over time (Weinberg 2016: 153). The latter is an “objective fact of an ongoing consciousness” (Weinberg 2016: 153). This sense of consciousness is available from a third personal point of view, and fills in the gaps that any person’s subjective experience might entail.

Thus, Weinberg contends that the identity, or continued existence, of consciousness consists in a metaphysical fact, rather than appropriation. Nevertheless, Weinberg additionally argues that the first personal (conscious) experience of our own mental states, whether those states are occurrent sensations, reflections, or via remembering is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of personal identity. In other words, to have the awareness (or knowledge) of an ongoing self—or (2)—we must have (1). Although there is a range of interpretations of Locke on consciousness on the table, Weinberg’s book, Consciousness in Locke , marks the first large-scale treatment of Locke’s views on consciousness. [ 6 ]

In addition to the debate over what consciousness is, and what Locke means when he says that the identity of any person consists in the identity of consciousness, there is ongoing debate about what Locke’s stance is when it comes to what can give rise to consciousness. That is, there is ongoing discussion of what Locke means when he says that God could have superadded thinking to formerly inert systems of matter, and what Locke’s actual position is on the substantial nature of finite thinkers. There are those who take Locke to be truly agnostic. Those who take this line of interpretation remind readers of Locke’s stated aims at the start of the Essay (as quoted earlier), and the epistemic modesty that Locke maintains throughout the text. But, there are others who think that Locke overstates the probability that souls are immaterial substances, so as not to ruffle the feathers of Stillingfleet and other religious authorities. Some in the latter group think that Locke leans toward materialism. This raises questions about how far Anthony Collins (discussed below) departs from the Lockean picture, or the degree to which Locke anticipates later materialist pictures of persons. [ 7 ] At the very least, it can be said that Locke challenges the importance that many philosophers place on the immaterial soul to personhood and personal identity. [ 8 ] As might be expected, this was met with mixed reviews.

This section addresses how Locke’s view was received by his contemporaries and by those writing in the remainder of the early modern period (16 th -18 th centuries). A good number of philosophers vehemently objected to Locke’s treatment of persons, though some defended it, and many others used it as an inspiration, or springboard, for their own views.

Many who objected to Locke’s treatment of persons did so because they objected to the decreased importance Locke places on the soul for personhood and personal persistence (see Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid, and Samuel Clarke, for example). Many such philosophers argue that numerical identity consists in no change at all , and the only kind of entity that allows for identity in this strict sense is an immaterial substance.

Along the way, some charged Locke’s theory of personal identity with circularity. As Joseph Butler puts it,

…[O]ne should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes. (1736 [1842: 298])

Butler then asserts that Locke’s misstep stems from his methodology. He says,

This wonderful mistake may possibly have arisen from hence; that to be endued with consciousness is inseparable from the idea of a person, or intelligent being. For this might be expressed inaccurately thus, that consciousness makes personality: and from hence it might be concluded to make personal identity. (1736 [1842: 298])

One of the points that Locke emphasizes—that persistence conditions are determined via defining kind terms—is what, according to Butler, leads Locke astray.

Butler additionally makes the point that memory is not required for personal persistence. He says,

But though present consciousness of what we at present do and feel is necessary to our being the persons we now are; yet present consciousness of past actions or feelings is not necessary to our being the same persons who performed those actions, or had those feelings. (1736 [1842: 298])

This is a point that others develop when they assert that Locke’s view results in contradiction.

The most popular, or well known, version of this line of objection comes from Thomas Reid (1785). In the “brave officer” objection, Reid poses the following challenge to Locke’s theory of personal identity. He says:

Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging. These things being supposed, it follows, from Mr. Locke’s doctrine, that he who was flogged at school is the same person who took the standard, and that he who took the standard is the same person who was made a general. Whence it follows, if there be any truth in logic, that the general is the same person with him who was flogged at school. But the general’s consciousness does not reach so far back as his flogging; therefore, according to Mr. Locke’s doctrine, he is not the person who was flogged. Therefore, the general is, and at the same time is not, the same person with him who was flogged at school. (Reid 1785 [1851: 248–249])

In this exercise (and other similar versions of it) we are supposed to assume Locke’s theory of personal identity, and maintain that sameness of person consists in sameness of consciousness. When we do, Reid expects we will conclude that the general (C) is the same person as he who took the standard from the enemy (B) because the general (C) remembers doing so. Additionally he who took the standard from the enemy (B) is the same person as he who was flogged at school for robbing the orchard (A) because he (B) remembers that past traumatic experience. Thus C (he who is was made general) is identical to B (he who took the standard) and B (he who took the standard) is identical to A (he who was flogged at school).

Given the law of transitivity (which says that if C is identical to B and B is identical to A, then C is identical to A), we should conclude that C (the general) is identical to A (the flogged school boy). But, since we are assuming Locke’s theory of personal identity, Reid thinks we cannot come to this conclusion. If we assume Locke’s view, Reid contends that we have to conclude that C (the general) is not identical to A (the school boy). This is because C (the general) has no consciousness or memory of having been flogged at school (A).

This and other similar objections are meant to show that if we place the identity of persons in the identity of consciousness, as Locke suggests, then we run into a problem—namely one of contradiction—for we get the result that C and A both are, and are not, identical. Nevertheless, as is made clear above, there is debate about whether Locke’s claims about identity of consciousness should be read in terms of memory, and whether Reid is correct to take “memory” and “consciousness” as synonymous terms for Locke.

Circularity and contradiction are just two of the major objections launched at Locke’s theory of personal identity shortly after it is published. Importantly, these are objections to which sympathetic readers of Locke are still responding (see Atherton 1983, Weinberg 2016, LoLordo 2012, Thiel 2011, Garrett 2003, Schechtman 2014, etc). This gives the reader a glimpse of some of the lines of attack that were launched against Locke’s discussion of persons during the early modern period. Nevertheless, not all of Locke’s peers attacked his picture of persons, and numerous philosophers worked to defend his view.

One such philosopher is Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Cockburn pens her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding in 1702. [ 9 ] In this text, Cockburn is responding to three pamphlets directed at Locke’s Essay . [ 10 ] These pamphlets take aim at Locke’s Essay rather broadly, and Cockburn’s Defence reflects this, but much is said about Locke on persons and their persistence conditions therein. Specifically, these pamphlets charge Locke with not proving that the soul is immortal, or threatening proofs of the immortality of the soul. They additionally charge that Locke’s view leaves us with the strange consequence that our souls are in constant flux, making it the case that we “awake with new souls each morning”. Given the importance of the soul, its persistence, and its immortality, to many traditional theories of personal identity, these objections are arguably intended to be objections to Locke’s picture of persons. Cockburn is quick to defend Locke, but proceeds carefully and thoroughly as she does so.

Cockburn points out that Locke never sets out to prove the soul immortal, and Locke actually claims that it is more probable that the soul is immaterial, than material. Moreover, even if Locke is not committed to the soul being immaterial, this ought not threaten proofs of the immortality of the soul. This is because what allows Locke to speculate that God could have superadded thinking to formerly inert systems of matter is that God is omnipotent, and surely an omnipotent being could make souls immortal even if they are material. Moreover, proofs for the immortality of the soul that rely on the immateriality of the soul are not likely to convince laymen of the soul’s immortality, and may actually leave them sceptical about whether the soul is indeed immortal (even if it is immaterial).

Cockburn additionally attacks the assertion that Locke’s claim that “men think not always” threatens proofs of the immortality of the soul. Of this she says,

But let it be granted, that it is ever so clearly proved, that thinking is necessary to the soul’s existence, that can no more prove, that it shall always exist, than it proves, that it has always existed; it being as possible for that omnipotence, which from nothing gave the soul a being , to deprive it of that being in the midst of its most vigorous reflections, as in an utter suspension of all thought. If then this proposition, that the soul always thinks , does not prove, that it is immortal, the contrary supposition takes not away any proof of it; for it is no less easy to conceive, that a being, which has the power of thinking with some intervals of cessation from thought, that has existed here for some time in a capacity of happiness or misery, may be continued in, or restored to the same state, in a future life, than that a Being which always thinks, may be continued in the same state. (Cockburn, in Sheridan (ed) 2006: 53)

As Cockburn points out, the notion that the soul is always thinking is not used as evidence for the soul’s immortality. Locke’s claim to the contrary thus ought not count as evidence against it, and we ought to have faith that an omnipotent God will ensure the soul’s immortality (whether it always thinks or not). Additionally, there is ample evidence that Locke thinks the soul is immortal, and that persons will go on to receive divine punishment and reward in the next life for their deeds in this life. This comes through not just in L-N 2.27 of the Essay , but also in Locke’s correspondence with Stillingfleet, and many of Locke’s religious writings, including the posthumously published “ Resurrectio et quae secuuntur ” (though Cockburn would not have had access to the latter while drafting her Defence ). [ 11 ]

Finally, Cockburn argues that the assumption that Locke’s view entails that we “awake with new souls each morning” rests on a misunderstanding. Just as a body that was in motion and comes to rest does not become a new body once it starts moving again, a soul that was thinking and ceases to think does not become a new soul once thought is restored to it. Thus, Locke’s claim that we do not always think—and indeed may have dreamless sleep—does not have the absurd consequences for the persistence of persons that the pamphlets charge. To this it might also be added that even if we awake with new souls each morning, it need not mean that we are new persons each morning, according to Locke.

Through the Defence , Cockburn additionally makes clear that although Locke’s theory of personal identity allows for sci-fi switches such as those described in the “prince and the cobbler” passage (L-N 2.27.15), the “waking and sleeping Socrates” passage (2.27.19), and the “day and night-man” passage (2.27.23), Locke does not think that this is the way things ordinarily go. In other words, in Locke’s view it is not that persons are switching bodies and swapping souls on a regular basis. Rather, Locke is making clear that we should distinguish between the concepts “man”, “body”, “soul”, and “person”. Moreover, the persistence of any person does not always align with the persistence of a human being or soul, as many assume. Making this point is the purpose of those imaginary cases.

Sixty-seven years after Cockburn’s Defence , and twenty-one years after the correspondence between Cockburn and Edmund Law ends, Law drafts a Defence of his own. Law’s Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity (1769) is later included in the 1823 version of Locke’s Works , and in it Law offers a particular reading of the ontological status of persons. Law defends a consciousness-based view, and makes much of Locke’s claim that person is a “forensic term”. Law moves from this point to the conclusion that Locke thinks persons are modes (or attributes) rather than substances (or things in themselves). He says,

Now the word Person , as is well observed by Mr. Locke …is properly a forensick term, and here to be used in the strickt forensick sense, denoting some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral agent, or an accountable creature; renders him the proper subject of Laws , and a true object of Rewards or Punishments. (1823: 1–2)

This is significant since whether Lockean persons are best thought of as substances, modes, or relations is something that is still debated amongst Locke scholars today.

While some philosophers were happy to defend Locke, as Cockburn and Law did, numerous philosophers writing in the eighteenth century utilized Locke’s theory of personal identity as a stepping stone to establish their own even more provocative views on persons. The ways in which these theorists go beyond Locke varies. Some of these are outlined below. [ 12 ]

In Anthony Collins’s correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1707–1708), it can often look as if Collins is a mere defender of Locke’s view. Collins holds a consciousness-based view of personal identity, and Collins invokes Locke’s discussion of persons and their persistence conditions throughout this lengthy exchange. Nevertheless, Collins takes Locke’s assertion that for all we know God could have superadded the ability to think to formerly inert systems of matter, and runs with it. As Larry Jorgensen puts it,

A significant difference between Collins and Locke…is that Collins thought that material systems provided a better explanatory basis for consciousness, which changes the probability calculus. Collins provides evidence that casts doubt on Locke’s claim that “it is in the highest degree probable” that humans have immaterial souls. Although he is building from a Lockean starting point, namely the possibility that God might superadd thinking to matter, he ends up with a naturalized version: thinking “follows from the composition or modification of a material system” (Clarke and Collins 2011: 48). (Jorgensen forthcoming)

Collins’s view on personal identity is a consciousness-based view, but what gives rise to consciousness, according to Collins, is likely a material system. Thus some take Locke’s purported agnosticism about the substantial nature of finite thinkers, and proceed more forcefully in the direction of materialism. In other words, Locke’s views on the substantial nature of finite thinkers opens the door to materialist views of persons and their persistence conditions.

Others take criticisms launched at Locke’s theory of personal identity, including the criticism that the self (or persisting self) is a fiction, and appear to embrace such consequences. [ 13 ] This can be seen rather readily in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1738). In the Treatise , Hume asserts that it is not clear how we can even have an idea of the self. This is because most take selves to be persisting entities, and all of our ideas come from corresponding impressions. But since our impressions constantly change, there is no one impression that can give rise to the idea we call “self”. Of this Hume says,

It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos’d to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, thro the whole course of our lives; since self is suppos’d to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea. (1738 Book I, Part IV, Section VI [1896: 251–252])

Moreover, whenever Hume looks for himself, all he finds are impressions. He says,

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (1738 [1896: 252])

This leads Hume to claim that we are just bundles of perceptions, in constant flux (1738 [1896: 252]).

Thus it is not only the case that we fail to have an idea of the self, according to Hume, but also the case that, properly speaking, no subsisting self persists from one moment to the next. It is the imagination that leads us astray when we think of ourselves, and other entities, as persisting over time (1738 [1896: 254]). As Hume puts it,

The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. (1738 [1896: 259])

It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects. (1738 [1896: 259])

In moving away from a more traditional substance-based view of personal identity (where the identity of person lies in the identity of soul), Locke opens the door to more fragmentary treatments of selves and persons. [ 14 ]

Along similar lines, some take Locke’s claim that the identity of persons lies in the identity of consciousness as fuel for the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no special relation between person x and any other future person. That is, personal identity only exists between present and past selves, not present and future selves. For this reason, we ought not have prudential concern, or concern for a future self that is distinct from our concern for others. This is the argumentative move that William Hazlitt makes, and in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he explicitly sets as his task showing

…that the human mind is naturally disinterested, or that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interests. (1805: 1)

This line of argumentation is replicated and expanded almost one hundred and eighty years later by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984), though it does not appear that Parfit is aware of Hazlitt’s view when he drafts his own. [ 15 ]

This section briefly outlines the lasting impact that Locke has had on the debate over persons and their persistence conditions by exploring how Locke’s theory of personal identity gets taken up in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most metaphysicians contributing to the debate over personal identity refer to Locke’s treatment of persons in their texts. Many even directly respond to Locke’s view as they flesh out their own.

Most who hold psychological continuity theories of personal identity take their views to be descendants of Locke’s. This is true of John Perry (1975), David Lewis (1976), Sydney Shoemaker (1984), and Derek Parfit (1984), for instance (Schechtman “Memory, Identity, and Sameness of Consciousness”, forthcoming in The Lockean Mind ). In fact, Parfit defends what he calls a “Lockean view” as recently as 2016 (34). What makes each of these views Lockean (at least according to their authors) is that, as Locke does, they take personal identity to consist in the continuity of psychological life, and they take this to mean that personal identity is relational. Moreover, like Locke, they emphasize the forensic nature of personhood.

Marya Schechtman offers a rival interpretation to those held by Perry, Lewis, Shoemaker, and Parfit, but Locke is very much in the foreground of Schechtman’s narrative account as well. In The Constitution of Selves (1996: 15), Schechtman claims,

The argument that personal identity must be defined in psychological terms is first systematically presented and defended by Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding

Schechtman then goes on to show that the project of psychological continuity theorists is “incoherent” because

[t]he goal of offering reidentification criterion is fundamentally at odds with the goal of defining personal identity in terms of psychological continuity…. (1996: 24)

Importantly, Schechtman does this not just by making a passing reference to Locke and then treating Parfit, Perry, and the like, but via a thorough examination of Locke’s theory, and the objections raised to it by Butler, Reid, and others.

Moreover, this is the case not only in Schechtman’s earlier work, but in her most recent work as well. Schechtman includes a thirty-two page chapter titled, “Locke and the Psychological Continuity Theorists” at the start of Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life (2014), and in “Memory, Identity, and Sameness of Consciousness”, Schechtman turns to recent developments in the psychological study of memory to update Locke’s view to “…capture some of the crucial insights of Locke’s account, and show why it remains relevant and influential” (in The Lockean Mind , forthcoming).

Those who defend animalism—or the view that persons just are human organisms—hold a position that is quite different from psychological continuity theories or narrative based views. Still, most animalists respond to Locke. Some even invoke Locke’s view as they develop their own. For example, Eric Olson’s animalist view relies very heavily both on Locke’s conception of “life”, and the persistence conditions Locke gives for organisms (1997: 137–138, etc.). This is why Olson describes his view as “Lockean”.

At the same time, some animalists blame Locke for separating the discussion of persons and personal identity from the discussion of human beings or human animals. In Animalism: New Essays on Persons, Animals & Identity , Stephen Blatti and Paul Snowdon ask, “Why was the idea of an animal conspicuously absent…” in the personal identity debate for so long (2016: 3)? They go on,

To answer this question, we need to return to Locke’s famous discussion of personal identity, in which the notion of an animal was central…Locke exercised great care in specifying the different ideas for which the words ‘animal’ and ‘person’ stood. A reasonable conjecture, or proposal, we suggest, is that Locke’s treatment of these two terms and notions was so effective that it generated in people engaging with the problem the conviction that the notion of a person is the central one fixing the type of thing the problem is about, with the consequence that the notion of an animal was lost to sight. (2016: 3)

Locke does much to distinguish between human beings (or men)—which are animals—and persons, and Blatti and Snowdon assert that this sets the stage for how the personal identity debate plays out for the next several hundred years. In other words, Locke is the reason that animalist views do not emerge until later in the twentieth century. [ 16 ]

Finally, even those working to carve out an entirely new space for the discussion of persons and their persistence conditions say something about Locke as they proceed. Leke Adeofe outlines and develops a tripartite picture of persons according to what he calls the “African thought system”. As he does, Adeofe aligns his approach with Locke’s. He says,

My approach, partly descriptive and partly imaginative, ought to be familiar; it has been borrowed from a tradition that dates back at least to John Locke. (2004: 69)

Moreover, this is the case even though Adeofe uses the African, or Yoruba, conception of “person” to challenge Western philosophy’s treatment of persons and their persistence conditions.

In Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (1988), Kathleen Wilkes takes aim at the proliferation of thought experiments in the personal identity literature. It is clear that Wilkes has the elaborate thought experiments that Parfit employs (including teletransportation, split brain cases, etc.) in mind throughout her critique. But, it is also clear that Wilkes traces this methodology back to Locke. Of this she says,

The subject of personal identity…has probably exploited the method [of thought experiments] more than any other problem area in philosophy. Many of the examples are familiar:…Locke testing ‘what we would say if’ the soul of a cobbler migrated into the body of a prince, or if the Mayor of Queinborough awoke one day with all of Socrates’ memories. (Wilkes 1988: 6)

The “prince and the cobbler” passage, or L-N 2.27.15, proceeds in the opposite direction, with Locke asking us what we would conclude about the soul of a prince entering and informing the body of a cobbler, but, regardless, Wilkes takes Locke and the tradition that follows, as her target as she works to move the discussion of personal identity away from fantasy cases and toward real-life ones.

Locke’s discussion of personal identity is central to the current debate over persons and their persistence conditions. Nevertheless, there are many different versions of Locke’s view that contemporary metaphysicians take themselves to be embracing or rejecting. Even those who describe their respective views as “Lockean”—Parfit and Olson, for instance—can end up defending very different pictures of persons. This highlights just how difficult it is to determine what Locke’s view on persons and their persistence conditions amounts to, despite how clear its importance is.

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• 1689, A Letter Concerning Toleration , reprinted and edited by John Tully, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989
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• Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Philosophical Writings: In Three Volumes, Vol. 1: Drafts A and B , (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke), Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245452.book.1
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animalism | Clarke, Samuel | Cockburn, Catharine Trotter | consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of | Descartes, René | Hume, David | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Locke, John | Locke, John: moral philosophy | personal identity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Chicago Early Modern Round Table for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this entry, Shelley Weinberg and an anonymous referee from SEP for insightful comments on later drafts. I’m also deeply indebted to Margaret Atherton, John Whipple, Marya Schechtman, and the many audiences I’ve gotten feedback from when I was just starting to think about Locke on personhood and personal identity.

Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Gordon-Roth < gordo216 @ umn . edu >

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Essay Samples on Personal Identity

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Hi all! I'm thinking about writing an essay that focuses on my personal identity. What are some ways to make this type of essay engaging and interesting to colleges? Any examples I should check out for inspiration? Thanks in advance!

Hello! Writing an essay that focuses on your personal identity can be a powerful way to showcase your unique experiences, interests, and perspectives. To make this type of essay engaging and interesting to colleges, consider the following tips:

1. Be authentic and vulnerable: Share your true feelings, thoughts, and struggles as they pertain to your identity. By being open about your experiences, you create a deep connection with the reader.

2. Focus on a specific aspect: Instead of trying to cover every detail of your identity, choose one or two key facets that define you. Delving into particular experiences and emotions will allow you to demonstrate depth and create a more compelling narrative.

3. Use descriptive language and vivid imagery: Paint a picture for the reader by using descriptive words and vivid imagery. This will help them visualize and connect with your story on a deeper level.

4. Show rather than tell: Instead of simply stating your thoughts and feelings about your identity, use anecdotes and examples to illustrate your point. By showing the reader your experiences, you'll create a more compelling and engaging essay.

5. Incorporate growth and development: Demonstrate how your understanding of your identity has evolved over time, and how it has shaped you as a person. This could include personal challenges you've faced, accomplishments, or newfound insights.

6. Reflect on the impact: Discuss how your identity has influenced your decisions, interests, and relationships. This reflection will help demonstrate the importance of your identity and its role in your life.

For examples and inspiration, you can browse through essays shared by students who were admitted to top colleges. Just be mindful not to copy their ideas or writing styles. Instead, use these examples to inspire your own unique angle in exploring your personal identity.

Best of luck with your essay and application process!

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• Knowledge Base
• Applying to graduate school
• How to Write Your Personal Statement | Strategies & Examples

How to Write Your Personal Statement | Strategies & Examples

Published on February 12, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 3, 2023.

A personal statement is a short essay of around 500–1,000 words, in which you tell a compelling story about who you are, what drives you, and why you’re applying.

To write a successful personal statement for a graduate school application , don’t just summarize your experience; instead, craft a focused narrative in your own voice. Aim to demonstrate three things:

• Your personality: what are your interests, values, and motivations?
• Your talents: what can you bring to the program?
• Your goals: what do you hope the program will do for you?

This article guides you through some winning strategies to build a strong, well-structured personal statement for a master’s or PhD application. You can download the full examples below.

Urban Planning Psychology History

Table of contents

Getting started with your personal statement, the introduction: start with an attention-grabbing opening, the main body: craft your narrative, the conclusion: look ahead, revising, editing, and proofreading your personal statement, frequently asked questions, other interesting articles.

Before you start writing, the first step is to understand exactly what’s expected of you. If the application gives you a question or prompt for your personal statement, the most important thing is to respond to it directly.

For example, you might be asked to focus on the development of your personal identity; challenges you have faced in your life; or your career motivations. This will shape your focus and emphasis—but you still need to find your own unique approach to answering it.

There’s no universal template for a personal statement; it’s your chance to be creative and let your own voice shine through. But there are strategies you can use to build a compelling, well-structured story.

The first paragraph of your personal statement should set the tone and lead smoothly into the story you want to tell.

Strategy 1: Open with a concrete scene

An effective way to catch the reader’s attention is to set up a scene that illustrates something about your character and interests. If you’re stuck, try thinking about:

• A personal experience that changed your perspective
• A story from your family’s history
• A memorable teacher or learning experience
• An unusual or unexpected encounter

To write an effective scene, try to go beyond straightforward description; start with an intriguing sentence that pulls the reader in, and give concrete details to create a convincing atmosphere.

Strategy 2: Open with your motivations

To emphasize your enthusiasm and commitment, you can start by explaining your interest in the subject you want to study or the career path you want to follow.

Just stating that it interests you isn’t enough: first, you need to figure out why you’re interested in this field:

• Is it a longstanding passion or a recent discovery?
• Does it come naturally or have you had to work hard at it?
• How does it fit into the rest of your life?
• What do you think it contributes to society?

Tips for the introduction

• Don’t start on a cliche: avoid phrases like “Ever since I was a child…” or “For as long as I can remember…”
• Do save the introduction for last. If you’re struggling to come up with a strong opening, leave it aside, and note down any interesting ideas that occur to you as you write the rest of the personal statement.

Once you’ve set up the main themes of your personal statement, you’ll delve into more detail about your experiences and motivations.

To structure the body of your personal statement, there are various strategies you can use.

Strategy 1: Describe your development over time

One of the simplest strategies is to give a chronological overview of key experiences that have led you to apply for graduate school.

• What first sparked your interest in the field?
• Which classes, assignments, classmates, internships, or other activities helped you develop your knowledge and skills?
• Where do you want to go next? How does this program fit into your future plans?

Don’t try to include absolutely everything you’ve done—pick out highlights that are relevant to your application. Aim to craft a compelling narrative that shows how you’ve changed and actively developed yourself.

My interest in psychology was first sparked early in my high school career. Though somewhat scientifically inclined, I found that what interested me most was not the equations we learned about in physics and chemistry, but the motivations and perceptions of my fellow students, and the subtle social dynamics that I observed inside and outside the classroom. I wanted to learn how our identities, beliefs, and behaviours are shaped through our interactions with others, so I decided to major in Social Psychology. My undergraduate studies deepened my understanding of, and fascination with, the interplay between an individual mind and its social context.During my studies, I acquired a solid foundation of knowledge about concepts like social influence and group dynamics, but I also took classes on various topics not strictly related to my major. I was particularly interested in how other fields intersect with psychology—the classes I took on media studies, biology, and literature all enhanced my understanding of psychological concepts by providing different lenses through which to look at the issues involved.

Strategy 2: Own your challenges and obstacles

If your path to graduate school hasn’t been easy or straightforward, you can turn this into a strength, and structure your personal statement as a story of overcoming obstacles.

• Is your social, cultural or economic background underrepresented in the field? Show how your experiences will contribute a unique perspective.
• Do you have gaps in your resume or lower-than-ideal grades? Explain the challenges you faced and how you dealt with them.

Don’t focus too heavily on negatives, but use them to highlight your positive qualities. Resilience, resourcefulness and perseverance make you a promising graduate school candidate.

Growing up working class, urban decay becomes depressingly familiar. The sight of a row of abandoned houses does not surprise me, but it continues to bother me. Since high school, I have been determined to pursue a career in urban planning. While people of my background experience the consequences of urban planning decisions first-hand, we are underrepresented in the field itself. Ironically, given my motivation, my economic background has made my studies challenging. I was fortunate enough to be awarded a scholarship for my undergraduate studies, but after graduation I took jobs in unrelated fields to help support my parents. In the three years since, I have not lost my ambition. Now I am keen to resume my studies, and I believe I can bring an invaluable perspective to the table: that of the people most impacted by the decisions of urban planners.

Strategy 3: Demonstrate your knowledge of the field

Especially if you’re applying for a PhD or another research-focused program, it’s a good idea to show your familiarity with the subject and the department. Your personal statement can focus on the area you want to specialize in and reflect on why it matters to you.

• Reflect on the topics or themes that you’ve focused on in your studies. What draws you to them?
• Discuss any academic achievements, influential teachers, or other highlights of your education.
• Talk about the questions you’d like to explore in your research and why you think they’re important.

The personal statement isn’t a research proposal , so don’t go overboard on detail—but it’s a great opportunity to show your enthusiasm for the field and your capacity for original thinking.

In applying for this research program, my intention is to build on the multidisciplinary approach I have taken in my studies so far, combining knowledge from disparate fields of study to better understand psychological concepts and issues. The Media Psychology program stands out to me as the perfect environment for this kind of research, given its researchers’ openness to collaboration across diverse fields. I am impressed by the department’s innovative interdisciplinary projects that focus on the shifting landscape of media and technology, and I hope that my own work can follow a similarly trailblazing approach. More specifically, I want to develop my understanding of the intersection of psychology and media studies, and explore how media psychology theories and methods might be applied to neurodivergent minds. I am interested not only in media psychology but also in psychological disorders, and how the two interact. This is something I touched on during my undergraduate studies and that I’m excited to delve into further.

Strategy 4: Discuss your professional ambitions

Especially if you’re applying for a more professionally-oriented program (such as an MBA), it’s a good idea to focus on concrete goals and how the program will help you achieve them.

• If your career is just getting started, show how your character is suited to the field, and explain how graduate school will help you develop your talents.
• If you have already worked in the profession, show what you’ve achieved so far, and explain how the program will allow you to take the next step.
• If you are planning a career change, explain what has driven this decision and how your existing experience will help you succeed.

Don’t just state the position you want to achieve. You should demonstrate that you’ve put plenty of thought into your career plans and show why you’re well-suited to this profession.

One thing that fascinated me about the field during my undergraduate studies was the sheer number of different elements whose interactions constitute a person’s experience of an urban environment. Any number of factors could transform the scene I described at the beginning: What if there were no bus route? Better community outreach in the neighborhood? Worse law enforcement? More or fewer jobs available in the area? Some of these factors are out of the hands of an urban planner, but without taking them all into consideration, the planner has an incomplete picture of their task. Through further study I hope to develop my understanding of how these disparate elements combine and interact to create the urban environment. I am interested in the social, psychological and political effects our surroundings have on our lives. My studies will allow me to work on projects directly affecting the kinds of working-class urban communities I know well. I believe I can bring my own experiences, as well as my education, to bear upon the problem of improving infrastructure and quality of life in these communities.

Tips for the main body

• Don’t rehash your resume by trying to summarize everything you’ve done so far; the personal statement isn’t about listing your academic or professional experience, but about reflecting, evaluating, and relating it to broader themes.
• Do make your statements into stories: Instead of saying you’re hard-working and self-motivated, write about your internship where you took the initiative to start a new project. Instead of saying you’ve always loved reading, reflect on a novel or poem that changed your perspective.

Your conclusion should bring the focus back to the program and what you hope to get out of it, whether that’s developing practical skills, exploring intellectual questions, or both.

Emphasize the fit with your specific interests, showing why this program would be the best way to achieve your aims.

Strategy 1: What do you want to know?

If you’re applying for a more academic or research-focused program, end on a note of curiosity: what do you hope to learn, and why do you think this is the best place to learn it?

If there are specific classes or faculty members that you’re excited to learn from, this is the place to express your enthusiasm.

Strategy 2: What do you want to do?

If you’re applying for a program that focuses more on professional training, your conclusion can look to your career aspirations: what role do you want to play in society, and why is this program the best choice to help you get there?

Tips for the conclusion

• Don’t summarize what you’ve already said. You have limited space in a personal statement, so use it wisely!
• Do think bigger than yourself: try to express how your individual aspirations relate to your local community, your academic field, or society more broadly. It’s not just about what you’ll get out of graduate school, but about what you’ll be able to give back.

You’ll be expected to do a lot of writing in graduate school, so make a good first impression: leave yourself plenty of time to revise and polish the text.

Your style doesn’t have to be as formal as other kinds of academic writing, but it should be clear, direct and coherent. Make sure that each paragraph flows smoothly from the last, using topic sentences and transitions to create clear connections between each part.

Don’t be afraid to rewrite and restructure as much as necessary. Since you have a lot of freedom in the structure of a personal statement, you can experiment and move information around to see what works best.

Finally, it’s essential to carefully proofread your personal statement and fix any language errors. Before you submit your application, consider investing in professional personal statement editing . For $150, you have the peace of mind that your personal statement is grammatically correct, strong in term of your arguments, and free of awkward mistakes.

A statement of purpose is usually more formal, focusing on your academic or professional goals. It shouldn’t include anything that isn’t directly relevant to the application.

A personal statement can often be more creative. It might tell a story that isn’t directly related to the application, but that shows something about your personality, values, and motivations.

However, both types of document have the same overall goal: to demonstrate your potential as a graduate student and s how why you’re a great match for the program.

The typical length of a personal statement for graduate school applications is between 500 and 1,000 words.

Different programs have different requirements, so always check if there’s a minimum or maximum length and stick to the guidelines. If there is no recommended word count, aim for no more than 1-2 pages.

If you’re applying to multiple graduate school programs, you should tailor your personal statement to each application.

Some applications provide a prompt or question. In this case, you might have to write a new personal statement from scratch: the most important task is to respond to what you have been asked.

If there’s no prompt or guidelines, you can re-use the same idea for your personal statement – but change the details wherever relevant, making sure to emphasize why you’re applying to this specific program.

If the application also includes other essays, such as a statement of purpose , you might have to revise your personal statement to avoid repeating the same information.

If you want to know more about college essays , academic writing , and AI tools , make sure to check out some of our other language articles with explanations, examples, and quizzes.

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Personal Identity & Self-Reflection Essay

Personal identity and self-reflection agree well with narrative since it is through language that human beings co-exist. The relationship between personal identity and narrative originates from Hume’s theory, which claims that how we connect with ideas as a product of memory constructs our sense of self. While Hume does not talk about narratives, it is apparent that narratives are ideas that appear as product of memory constructs. Hence, narration is a key way of connecting reflections and offering a sense of identity.

Narratives connect many incidences to create an ideal object such as a historical event. Narration and the selves play a major role in the creation of these ideal objects, although this does not necessarily apply to the creation of all ideal objects. Tolstoy’s narration connects many incidences to explain to us about the death of Ivan Ilych. He starts by showing us the kind of life that Ivan Led.

Ivan led a life that was full of hypocrisy. He lived by the standards of the aristocratic society rather than using his individual reasoning to determine his life. Ivan married because the society expected a brilliant young lawyer with money to have a wife from a good family like Praskovya. “Ivan Ilych married…because his social circle approved of the match (Tolstoy par. 65).

He also purchased a house in the city so that he could have a symbol of material status, as dictated by the aristocratic society. As the story develops, we get to know more about Ivan through his self-reflection.

In the reflection, Ivan examined his past life and the values that he had lived by in all of his life. After self-scrutiny of his life, Ivan recognized the inevitability of death and the hypocritical nature of his past life. Following these realizations, he decided to defend himself but he realized that he had nothing to use for his defense. He had to admit that he had spent all of his life unrealistically and that his perception on life and death was a lie. Apparently, Tolstoy connects all these incidences to explain the death of Ivan.

We also argue that observers ascribe identity, as it is not intrinsic in the associated things. Ivan’s peers are the ones who recognize that than Ivan does not like associating himself with unpleasant things. Later in the novel, we see this aspect establishing itself as a central feature of Ivan’s personality. Ivan begins to exclude himself from indecorous elements of life. He leaves his expectant wife when her behavior begins to depress him.

“ ..Ivan Ilych hoped to escape from the unpleasantness of this state of affairs by the same easy and decorous relation to life that had served him heretofore ” (Tolstoy par. 23).

He separates himself from his family and resorts to office life. He starts looking at his marriage life from a formal perspective. “And Ivan Ilych evolved such an attitude towards married life” (Tolstoy par. 45). He only required of it those conveniences. Similar to how he views his profession, he begins to see his marriage as a contract.

He makes sure that he keeps away from his wife by inviting friends whenever he is at home for dinner. Ivan begins playing games with his wife as he unable to handle his personal and emotional life. He strictly adheres to his professional duties and separates his personal life from is profession. However, Ivan is unable to direct his personal life fully.

Personal identity is indissoluble from self-reflection as the observer recognizes it during reflection and not through spontaneous connection of ideas in the mind. From this perspective, personal identity is a product of constant reflections as depicted by Ivan. Ivan was reflecting one day while staring at Gerasim’s face when he started to wonder whether he had lived a correct life. “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done” (Tolstoy par. 108).

A few minutes later, he realized he had lived a life full of lies. All aspects of his life including his family life, as well as his professional and social life were all full of lies. “And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false” (Tolstoy par. 126).

Following the realization, he decided to defend himself but he realized that he had nothing to use for his defense. He had to admit that he had spent all of his life unrealistically and that his perception on life and death was a lie.

This revelation compelled Ivan to seek for the truth. He approached the doctor together with Praskovya and asked them to tell him the truth about his life. What bothered him a lot was the thought that he might have had led all of his life in the wrong way. Even with the new revelations, Ivan did not wholly dismiss the hope that he might have led a correct life.

From the above discussion, we can see that there exists an in-depth connection between narration, personal identity and self-reflection. A narrative is an informative tool that communicates social expressions of the self. The self is not an object, but a being and a creation that reflects on itself to discover and restructure itself completely through symbols of self- interpretation.

It is only through narrative constructions of memories that we can understand our past because the past is indefinite. The way we connect with past ideas as a product of memory constructs our sense of self. Narratives are also ideas and therefore, a key way of connecting reflections and offering a sense of identity.

Works Cited

Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich. The Death of Ivan Ilych . Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York: Pennsylvania State University, 1886. Web.

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"Personal Identity & Self-Reflection." IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/personal-identity-self-reflection/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Personal Identity & Self-Reflection'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Personal Identity & Self-Reflection." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personal-identity-self-reflection/.

1. IvyPanda . "Personal Identity & Self-Reflection." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personal-identity-self-reflection/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Personal Identity & Self-Reflection." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personal-identity-self-reflection/.

• Novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Leo Tolstoy
• Mortality and Unfulfillment in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
• “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Tolstoy: The Main Characters
• ”The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy: The Later Period of the Author’s Career
• The Death of Ivan Ilych: Face Death With Dignity
• The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Metamorphosis
• Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”: Short Story Analysis
• Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich": Characters Analysis
• The Elephant in the Room: Existentialism and the Denial of Death
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
• Feng Shui: Does it work in modern times?
• Definition of Integrity, Its Norms and Unity
• William Paley's Watchmaker Analogy
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• Summa Theologica and Natural Law

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University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity

Jennifer Whiting, First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity , Oxford University Press, 2016, 261pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199967919.

Reviewed by David O. Brink, University of California, San Diego

This is the first of three volumes of Jennifer Whiting's collected papers and focuses on issues about personal identity and friendship. The volume's eight essays are all previously published, but in disparate venues, so the volume allows the reader to see the cumulative force of ideas developed piecemeal and recurrent themes. Whiting herself identifies three such themes. First, she focuses on psychic contingenc y and variability , which is sometimes a symptom of pathology but often a reminder that familiar assumptions of moral psychology are neither universal nor necessary. Second, she explores Aristotle's conception of the friend as another self and its significance for our understanding of intrapersonal and interpersonal relations and concern. Her third theme emerges from the second and involves a non-egocentric perspective on self-love and love of others. She treats the interpersonal case as prior in explanation and justification to the intrapersonal case.

Her outside-in strategy contrasts with the inside-out strategy that goes with an egocentric assimilation of the interpersonal case to the intrapersonal case. This leads her to defend an ethocentric , or character-based, conception of both prudential concern and friendship. There are important kinds of historical influence and inspiration in these essays, including Whiting's exploration of Aristotle's conception of friendship, her discussion of Platonic love, and her discussion of Plato's conception of the soul in the Republic . However, most of the essays concentrate on systematic, rather than historical, issues and debates. Apparently, the other two volumes of essays will be more historical, focusing on the metaphysical and psychological basis of Aristotle's ethics.

These essays are long and densely argued, defying easy summary. But they are extremely rewarding and repay careful study. They display philosophical imagination and give expression to an independent voice. Whiting's essays are also deeply personal, reflecting ongoing conversations with her philosophical mentors, colleagues, and friends. Whiting is engaged in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Sydney Shoemaker, Derek Parfit, Annette Baier, and Terence Irwin, among others, and one comes away with a strong sense of her as a philosophical interlocutor . Her essays on personal identity and friendship are among the most important work on these topics in the last three decades. Her defense of a broadly psychological reductionist conception of personal identity is a worthy successor to the contributions of Shoemaker and Parfit, and her ethocentric conception of friendship and self-love is an important and original contribution to the literature on love and friendship. Anyone interested in these philosophical topics will profit from reading these essays together.

In what follows, I summarize the contributions of individual essays and then turn to raising some questions about her claims about personal identity and friendship.

In traditional debates about the nature of personal identity, Locke, Bishop Butler, and Thomas Reid agree that personal identity is a forensic concept, tied to backward-looking normative concerns about responsibility and desert and forward-looking ones involving the special concern one has for one's own future that is different from the sort of concern one has for others to whom one stands in no special relationship. In "Friends and Future Selves" Whiting explores the worry that Butler and Reid raise that Lockean conceptions of personal identity cannot explain and justify special concern, because they recognize identity in only a "loose and popular," not a "strict and philosophical," sense.

Though she raises questions about whether personal identity is sufficient for special concern, her main claim is that it is not necessary. Interpersonal relationships, such as friendship, also display a form of special concern that does not presuppose personal identity. In fact, friendship allows us to stand the normal assumption that special concern requires personal identity on its head -- it's not just that special concern does not presuppose personal identity but rather that personal identity presupposes special concern. Just as special concern for one's friend is part of what makes that person a friend, so too special concern for oneself is part of what establishes psychological continuity within one's own life. Presumably, special concern involves not only positive affective regard for its target but also a suite of behavioral dispositions to make various investments and sacrifices for the sake of that person. Whiting's claim is that special concern is not the product of personal identity so much as an essential constituent of it.

Friendship is the focus of "Impersonal Friends," where Whiting examines Aristotle's claim that the friend is "another oneself" ( Nicomachean Ethics 1161b 19, 28-35, 1169b4-6; Magna Moralia 1213a2-23) and defends her ethocentric interpretation that the ground of the best sort of friendship is the friend's virtuous character. She defends this kind of impersonal friendship for another's virtue against Gregory Vlastos's objections and against an egocentric interpretation defended by Irwin and myself, according to which friendship makes the beloved's interests an extension of the agent's own interests. [1] Both the egocentric and ethocentric interpretations agree that friends stand to each other in psychological relations much as a person stands psychologically to his own future self and that friends should care for each other as they care for themselves. But whereas the egocentric interpretation reads these claims from the inside-out -- extending claims from the intrapersonal case to the interpersonal one -- Whiting's ethocentric interpretation reads these claims from the outside-in -- drawing lessons for the intrapersonal case from the interpersonal one. She thinks that the outside-in strategy is to be preferred, in part because she thinks the egocentric approach supports a "colonial" attitude toward friends. [2]

In "Trusting First and Second Selves", Whiting examines Baier's claims about the importance of trust among friends. She subjects Baier's claims to friendly amendment in which she argues that a certain amount of distrust or at least a willingness to distrust is a mark of healthy relationships to friends and to oneself. She leverages Virginia Woolf's concerns in Three Guineas to raise questions about whether we ought to trust ourselves fully. Presumably, these forms of distrust are also justified in response to blindspots and implicit bias. We can't imagine theoretical or practical reasoning without some substantial degree of trust in our earlier selves, but that trust needs to be balanced with a healthy dose of fallibilism. Presumably, these reasons to adopt a fallibilist attitude toward ourselves apply to friends and others. Common projects won't succeed without considerable trust, but that trust should be leavened with a willingness to question the assumptions and commitments of our friends.

In "Back to 'The Self and the Future'" Whiting revisits a debate between Shoemaker and Bernard Williams over the possibility of "body swaps" of the sort discussed by Shoemaker in the famous Brownson case, in which Brown's brain is transplanted into Robinson's body. [3] To separate psychological continuity and sameness of brain, we might modify the Brownson case so that Brownson is psychologically continuous with Brown without having Brown's brain. We could do this by scanning Brown's brain states and then reconfiguring Robinson's brain so as to realize Brown's psychology. Brownson would then be psychologically, but in no way physically, continuous with Brown. Even Williams initially agrees with Shoemaker that Brownson seems to be Brown, because he inherits Brown's mental life. But Williams thinks that our intuitions here are unstable. If we re-describe such a case in terms of psychological changes that will be induced in you prior to the person in your body being tortured, Williams claims, we will find that we still experience special concern for the psychologically discontinuous person who will be tortured, revealing that our criteria of identity are physical or bodily.

Whiting does a nice job of reconstructing the dialectic and pointing out ways in which Williams begs the question against Shoemaker and psychological continuity. Moreover, she invokes her comparison of friends and future selves to motivate the idea, which Williams must deny, that personal identity can be indeterminate. Interpersonal associations come in degrees, with the result that some associations are clearly friendships, some are clearly not, and some have an indeterminate status. If intrapersonal relations are relevantly like friendship, we should be receptive to the idea that some forms of psychological continuity are sufficient for personal identity, some are insufficient, and some have an indeterminate status.

"Personal Identity: The Non-Branching Form of What Matters" is an excellent exposition and defense of a broadly psychological reductionist claim that personal identity consists in non-branching psychological continuity. Whiting usefully distinguishes two strands in this tradition -- a reductionist strand, which she associates with Parfit, and a non-reductionist strand, which she associates with Shoemaker and defends. This distinction might also be understood as a contrast between two different kinds of reductionism with different objects. Shoemaker and Parfit both accept psychological reductionism about personal identity insofar as they both think that persons P1 and P2 are identical insofar as the later one is related to the earlier one by non-branching psychological continuity. [4] Notice that the definiens of reductionism about personal identity invokes the concept of a person. Parfit and Shoemaker part company over whether to accept reductionism about persons, with Parfit embracing reductionism about persons and Shoemaker denying it. Parfit thinks that persons can be reduced to (or perhaps eliminated in favor of) mental happenings that need not be ascribed to a person or thinker ( Reasons and Persons §81), whereas Shoemaker thinks that mental states should be understood functionally as states of a system -- a person -- with characteristic inputs, outputs, and relations to other internal states of the system. Whiting plausibly suggests that the debate between Shoemaker and Parfit can be traced to two different strands in Locke's views about personal identity. Parfit's reductionism about persons fits best with the passive dimensions of Locke's focus on experiential memory, whereas Shoemaker's non-reductionism about persons fits best with Locke's emphasis on the forensic role of persons and the connection between persons and agency.

"One is Not Born but Becomes a Person: The Importance of Philosophical Mothering" engages some of Baier's reflections about the limitations in traditional rationalist conceptions of persons as anti-naturalistic, individualistic, and intellectualist. Whiting wants to endorse many aspects of Baier's naturalism about persons and her emphasis on the way in which normative maturation is dependent on proper nurture from another. But she wants to embrace these claims while rejecting Baier's critique of the method of cases and thought experiments prevalent in the literature on personal identity.

"Love: Self-Propagation, Self-Preservation, or Ekstasis?" looks at the analysis of interpersonal love in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus , comparing three different kinds of readings -- Irwin's egocentric conception, Harry Frankfurt's identificationist conception, and her own ecstatic conception, in which the lover literally transcends himself. Whiting thinks the ecstatic conception is necessary to explain the claims the beloved makes on the lover and the reciprocity that one finds in the best sort of love.

"Psychic Contingency in the Republic " is a discussion of Plato's claims about the human soul in the Republic . Whiting contrasts a realist reading that takes seriously Plato's talk of parts of the soul and identifies the person with the rational part of her soul with a deflationist reading that understands parts of the soul to be simply different aspects of an agent. This debate seems bound up with how many parts of the soul Plato recognizes and which parts these are. Some commentators think that Book IV's understanding of akrasia requires a deflationist conception of the parts of the soul so that we can understand the agent acting against her own better judgment, but they also think that the discussion of deviant constitutions and souls in Books VIII-IX requires taking seriously the idea that different parts of an agent's soul act as independent agents. Both realists and deflationists tend to assume that we need a consistent reading of the soul and its parts throughout the Republic and that Plato accepts a tripartite division of the soul throughout.

Whiting questions these assumptions. She argues that when Plato talks about the relations among the parts of the soul in virtuous and non-virtuous people the number and identity of the relata and the nature of the relation can vary. In the virtuous person, there is a reason-responsive harmony between reason, emotion, and the appetites, so that it is misplaced to think of faction and rule of one part by others. By contrast, in non-virtuous persons there is psychic conflict, and the number and identity of the factions will depend on the ways in which the individual is reasons-responsive or not. This leads Whiting to defend a hybrid reading of Books II-IV and VII-IX in which deflationists are roughly right in their treatment of the appetites in II-IV and the realists are roughly right about the parts of corrupt souls in VIII-IX. Her case for contingency and variability in Plato's moral psychology in the Republic is exceptionally rich and interesting and repays careful reading.

Any reader should find these essays rewarding and stimulating. Different readers will be drawn to different themes and will assess Whiting's claims differently. I'll close by raising some questions about Whiting's contrast between egocentric and ethocentric conceptions of intrapersonal and interpersonal unity, and her defense of the ethocentric conception.

Both intrapersonal and interpersonal unity are matters of psychological continuity, and what separates intrapersonal and garden-variety interpersonal cases is a matter of degree, not kind. The egocentric conception adopts an inside-out approach, claiming that interpersonal psychological continuity extends the person's interests, even when it does not extend her life. Fission in which Tom's psychology is transferred to two persons -- Dick and Harry -- is the limiting form of interpersonal psychological continuity, because the degree of continuity is, by hypothesis, maximal. Here, Tom does not literally survive fission, because identity is a one-one relation and psychological continuity is a one-many relation, but nonetheless we can see Tom's interests preserved in the lives of Dick and Harry. Tom has posthumous interests in the lives of Dick and Harry. Of course, fission is a thought experiment. But there are real forms of interpersonal psychological continuity all around us, notably in relationships between friends and loved ones who share experiences and discussion with each other, influence each other psychologically, and care about each other. We often talk about the interests of the beloved as part of the interests of the lover, and the egocentric conception asks us to take this seriously.

By contrast, the ethocentric conception adopts an outside-in approach, claiming that self-love should be understood on the model of love of another. In particular, the ethocentric conception claims that the basis of interpersonal love is love of the character -- in particular, the virtuous character or perhaps the capacity for virtuous character -- of another. This is a kind of impersonal love. When we extend this conception to the intrapersonal case, we see that even love of one's future self is not egocentric but is or should be an impersonal love of the virtuous character of one's future self. Rather than loving another as myself, I should love myself as I love another.

As we have seen, Whiting defends her ethocentric conception both as an interpretation of Aristotle's conception of friendship and as a systematic proposal in part because she thinks that the egocentric approach imparts an objectionably colonial attitude toward interpersonal love and friendship. I am skeptical of both claims. I think that Aristotle's eudaimonism commits him to the egocentric conception, that his claims about the friend as another self conform to the inside-out approach ( EN 1170b6-9), and that treating the good of another as a complete, but not unconditionally complete, good can avoid taking a colonial attitude toward others. [5] I have argued for these claims elsewhere but don't want to re-litigate them here. Instead, I want to raise a concern about Whiting's ethocentric conception and mention an alternative to both egocentric and ethocentric conceptions that she might find congenial.

The basis of ethocentric concern for another is the other's valuable traits. This explains one's reasons for becoming friends with another on account of the other's traits. But it seems more problematic as the ground for concern for another who is already one's friend. If my reason for caring for my friend consists in her virtuous or valuable traits, then it seems that I care about her virtue, rather than herself. The ethocentric conception has difficulty explaining why I should care more about my friend than other virtuous people with whom I am not friends or why I shouldn't be willing to "trade up" from my virtuous friend to a still more virtuous stranger. Whiting does offer pragmatic reasons for privileging one's virtuous friends over virtuous strangers -- epistemic and causal factors allow one to better promote virtue with those one already knows and associates with (p. 61). But like Henry Sidgwick's similar pragmatic utilitarian justification of special concern and special obligations and John Perry's impersonal justification of personal projects, these pragmatic rationales for special concern may seem insufficient to underwrite robust special concern for oneself and one's friends. [6]

We can avoid these worries about ethocentric special concern by claiming that it is the shared history with the individual who is a friend that grounds an agent-relative form of special concern for her that one doesn't have for a stranger, however virtuous. One form of agent-relative concern is egocentric. But we can make sense of agent-relative concern that is not egoistic. Let us stipulate that prudence and egocentric concern presuppose personal identity, inasmuch as both assume that reasons are grounded in self-interest. Fission teaches us that we can have agent-relative special concern in the absence of personal identity, provided there is psychological continuity. But then we can formulate agent-relative concern that presupposes continuity, rather than identity. Taking a page from the Lockean reply to Butler's circularity worry, we might call this special concern quasi-prudence and treat it as a quasi-egocentric conception. Once we see that there is interpersonal psychological continuity to be found outside of fission cases in more familiar forms of association, we can see how we might defend a quasi-egocentric conception of friendship. This quasi-egocentric conception would be different from the egocentric conception in not viewing the friend through the lens of self-interest, but it would also be different from the ethocentric conception in assigning intrinsic, and not just pragmatic, significance to the shared history between friends.

We might compare the quasi-egocentric conception of special concern with C.D. Broad's doctrine of self-referential altruism in his unjustly neglected essay "Self and Others." [7] Broad was reacting to the reductionist tendencies in Sidgwick's two methods of ethics -- egoism and utilitarianism. Broad thought that egoism cannot do justice to our duties to others and that utilitarianism cannot do justice to our special obligations. So, he introduced an agent-relative alternative between these extremes that he thought better reflected ordinary views about special concern for others. Self-referential altruism recognizes non-derivative reason to benefit others but it says that

each of us has specially urgent obligations to benefit certain individuals and groups which stand in certain special relations to himself , e.g. his parents, his children, his fellow-countrymen, etc. And it holds that these special relationships are the ultimate and sufficient ground for those specially urgent claims on one's beneficence. ("Self and Others," 279-80).

Self-referential altruism is a hybrid of two non-derivative elements: an agent-neutral concern for anyone it is in one's power to affect for better or worse and an agent-relative special concern for those to whom one stands in special relationships. The quasi-egocentric conception stands to egocentric and ethocentric rivals much as self-referential altruism stands to egoism and utilitarianism. Because it is a hybrid of inside-out and outside-in elements, a quasi-egocentric conception may have virtues that its purebred rivals don't. Perhaps the take-home message from "Friends and Future Selves" should be a hybrid conception, rather than the ethocentric conception we find in "Impersonal Friends."

[1] See Gregory Vlastos, "The Individual as Object of Love in Plato" in Platonic Studies (Princeton University Press, 1981) and Terence Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles (Clarendon Press, 1988), ch. 18. I have defended the egocentric interpretation in "Rational Egoism, Self, and Others" in Identity, Character, and Morality , ed. O. Flanagan and A. Rorty (MIT Press, 1990); "Self-love and Altruism" Social Philosophy & Policy Social Philosophy & Policy 14 (1997): 122-57; "Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community" Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999): 252-89; and "Eudaimonism and Cosmopolitan Concern" in Virtue, Happiness, and Knowledge: Themes from the Work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin , ed. D. Brink, S. Meyer, and C. Shields (Clarendon Press, forthcoming).

[2] I find it puzzling that Whiting thinks that I badly misread her "Friends and Future Selves" (1986) in my "Rational Egoism, Self, and Others" (1990) as presupposing a form of rational egoism (pp. 9, 198). I explicitly acknowledge that we come to the intrapersonal/interpersonal comparison from different perspectives: "On the surface, her position is just the reverse of mine; she wants to model the justification of self-concern on concern for one's friends, whereas I want to model the justification of concern for one's friends (and others more generally) on self-concern. I'm less clear that our different routes to this comparison between self-concern and concern for one's friends require us to disagree on the substance of the comparison." ("Rational Egoism, Self, and Others," 373). So not only do I not presuppose that she is a rational egoist, I deny it, but nonetheless wonder if we could agree on the substance of the comparison. To put it in terms of the metaphors introduced here, I acknowledge that while my approach is inside-out and hers is outside-in, I wonder if we could nonetheless meet somewhere in the middle.

[3] See Sydney Shoemaker, Self-knowledge and Self-Identity (Cornell University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 22-25 and Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future" reprinted in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973).

[4] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, 1984), Part III and Sydney Shoemaker, "Personal Identity: A Materialist's Account" in S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne, Personal Identity (Blackwell, 1984).

[5] See my essays mentioned in note 1. However, as Whiting points out (p. 10), Magna Moralia 1212b18-20 can be read so as to support the outside-in reading.

[6] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics , 7 th ed. (Macmillan, 1907), esp. pp. 431-39 and John Perry, "The Importance of Being Identical" in The Identities of Persons , ed. A. Rorty (University of California Press, 1976). Interestingly, Whiting's pragmatic rationale for special concern in "Impersonal Friends" seems in tension with her criticism of Perry's pragmatic rationale for personal projects in "Friends and Future Selves" (pp. 35-38).

[7] C.D. Broad, "Self and Others" in Broad's Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy , ed. D. Cheney (George Allen and Unwin, 1971).

Self-identity and personal identity

• Published: 07 August 2020
• Volume 20 , pages 235–247, ( 2021 )

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• John J. Drummond   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7197-2593 1  

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The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. Self-identity is rooted in the formal, temporalizing structure of intentional experience that underlies psychological continuity. Personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions adopted passively or actively in reflection by a self-identical subject in the light of her social and traditional inheritances. Secondarily, a person’s identity is rooted in others’ characterizations of that person in the light of the social conventions and constructs of the cultures and traditions that have shaped the personal identity of the ones who make the attributions. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods, that is, in the subject’s convictions about the true, the good, and the right—and in the commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and to the practical identities rooted in those convictions.

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What Is the Function of Confirmation Bias?

Positive Psychology: An Introduction

Consider the Brave Officer case: Suppose a boy of ten (A) is flogged for stealing apples from an orchard. At forty, a general (B) bravely takes a standard from the enemy and remembers his having been flogged at ten. At eighty, the general (C) remembers taking the standard, but he has forgotten having been flogged. On the memory version of personal identity, A is the same person as B, and B is the same person as C. But A is not the same person as C. This result, however, is contradictory, for the general (B=C) both is and is not the same the boy who was flogged (A); see Reid 2002 , 276.

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Drummond, J.J. Self-identity and personal identity. Phenom Cogn Sci 20 , 235–247 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09696-w

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Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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Best Psychology Essay Examples

Personal identity essay.

667 words | 3 page(s)

Finding one’s identity is a never ending journey that only stops when one dies. As so, every day of my life, I have made it my quest to realize every part of me that I possibly can. I do so with the same conviction that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had when he wrote ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, “that I may allow myself to be persuaded my own faith that human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers gave birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves”. And so this is a documentation, a journal of sorts, of all my identities.

Ethnic Identity I am a rich blend of different ethnic origins culminating in a rare multiple cultural identity. My dad is of Cuban, Spanish and Yuki Indian origins, while my mom is Czech. This rich blend of different origins so different in culture and beliefs enables me to assume a globally diverse culture where all these four different cultures mash up to form one unique ethnic identity that allows me to almost assimilate into any culture while maintain the beliefs and cultural diversity that is present in my parents and childhood.

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Gender Identity Gender is the one of the definitive identities that shape one’s life, from career choices to lifestyle and character. Gender defines an individual through and through. My being female, gives me the identity of one who cares, feels and expresses emotion on a much higher level.

Zodiac Identity Zodiac signs are believed and have been proven to define one’s identity in the form of characteristics and behaviour. I believe the fact that I am of the Libra zodiac sign, I can find out and understand more of my behaviour, character and possibly weaknesses and flaws that are underlying. It is said that Libra is one of the most sociable signs in the zodiac. Librans find balance from colours content and the elements, making them handle all situations with grace, putting others at ease. As a result, Librans tend to be drawn toward creative undertakings.

National Identity Each nation in the world embodies a given national spirit that drives and identifies its citizens, setting them apart from other nationalities. My national identity is American. The American nation embodies freedom, the sheer will to succeed and develop a wealthy life full of abundance and joy. This is the American spirit, thus the term “The American Dream”.

Regional Identity Every region in every nation or country is characterized with its own identity that is synonymous with its people. As a Californian, my identity entails roots from the cultures of Mexico, Spain and the eastern United states. The Californian culture assimilates languages, traditions and foods from all over the world. It has a unique English dialect that incorporates words from different languages. Its unique cuisines make California particularly unique and stand out.

Personal Identity Ultimately, personal identity form the core of one’s true identity. In order to discover who I am, I need to discover what makes me who I am, my character and behaviour that defines me. I have a conservative sense of fashion and I am an animal lover. I can define myself as a mainly phlegmatic as I am nurturing, sympathetic and emotionally expressive. This explains my need and drive to take care of stray animals, even taking a class to learn how to care for them in a better way.

The journey to discover and uncover my true and complete identity goes on with each passing day. I aim to take on every task and challenge to know who I truly am till the day I can confidently answer the question “Who are you?”

• García, Márquez G. and Grossman Edith. Love in the Time of Cholera. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Print.
• Samovar, Larry A, Richard E. Porter, Edwin R. McDaniel, and Carolyn S. Roy. Communication between Cultures. Boston: Cenage Learning, 2013. Print.

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17 episodes

Welcome to "Building Belief," where we are committed to women breaking free from limiting beliefs and stepping into their full potential. Hosted by social entrepreneur Abby Skeans, this transformative series is dedicated to exploring the profound impact of one's internal beliefs on personal growth and societal change.

Building Belief with Abby Skeans Abby Skeans

• 5.0 • 2 Ratings
• APR 8, 2024

Trusting Yourself: You Already Know The Answers You Seek

Have you ever stood at the crossroads of a crucial decision, echoing the words, "I just don't know what to do"? You're not alone. This universal sentiment rings true for many of us, more times than we can count. But here's a revelation – you often have the answers you're searching for; they're woven into the very fabric of your being, waiting to be acknowledged. The challenge isn't in seeking new advice but in recognizing and trusting the wisdom that resides within you. In this episode, we delve deep into the essence of self-trust. We explore the transformative power of betting on yourself and embracing the profound truth that you are, without a doubt, the most reliable advisor you'll ever know. Through insightful discussions and practical advice, we'll guide you on a journey to unlock your inner wisdom, empowering you to navigate life's decisions with confidence and clarity. Join us as we embark on this journey of self-discovery. Learn why it's not just about making choices, but about understanding the unparalleled value of trusting your instincts and the incredible insights you hold within. It's time to believe in yourself, fully and unconditionally. After all, the best guidance you can ever receive is from the person who knows you best – you. This season is sponsored by the Spiritual Motherhood Project at the Fetzer Institute.  Links:  Be the first to get BIG news, secret drops & all the details from my heart to your inbox.  . . . . For additional thoughts and tools, join the Belief Statements journal on ⁠Substack⁠. . . . . Join the Building Belief community by subscribing to RITUAL. . . . . Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abbyskeans/ Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigailskeans/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• APR 1, 2024

Trailer: Building Belief with Abby Skeans

Welcome to "Building Belief," where we are committed to women breaking free from limiting beliefs and stepping into their full potential. Hosted by social entrepreneur Abby Skeans, this transformative series is dedicated to exploring the profound impact of one's internal beliefs on personal growth and societal change. Abby's own journey from darkness to light, overcoming depression, trauma, and abuse, ignited her quest to uncover life-altering modalities that liberated her from deep-seated limiting beliefs. Now, she invites you to join her on a journey of discovery and empowerment. In each episode of "Building Belief," Abby engages in candid and inspiring conversations with remarkable women who have not only conquered their own inner demons but have also catalyzed change in the lives of others. From sharing stories of triumph over adversity to revealing the secrets behind cultivating unshakeable self-belief, these discussions offer invaluable insights and actionable strategies for personal transformation. Together with her guests, Abby shares practical tools and transformative resources aimed at equipping women with the courage and confidence to embrace their true selves. Whether it's through daily rituals, resilience-building techniques, or profound moments of introspection, listeners will be supported to embrace the truth of who they already are. "Building Belief" isn't just a podcast; it's a movement. It's a platform for women to harness their innate potential and channel their self-belief into tangible actions that drive positive change in the world. From launching meaningful projects to championing innovative ideas and spearheading impactful organizations, the possibilities are endless when women recognize and embrace their inherent worth. Join us on "Building Belief" and become part of a community of women committed to healing, empowerment, and creativity. Together, we'll challenge the status quo, break down barriers, and create a world where every woman is free.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• NOV 7, 2023

YOU ALREADY ARE: An Essay on Believing In Yourself

For this final episode, I wanted to finish where we started, with the idea of trusting ourselves. The very first episode that I released was called “you already know” and was based on an essay that I penned years ago. It has been a lesson that I have to learn continually, and come back to often. The idea that I am the most credible and trustworthy person when it comes to steering my life and purpose has been a hard truth to sink into.  The message that I want to leave you with at the end of Season 1 and at the end of 2023 is this: you already are. Let that sink deep into your soul. Today, this month, this year.  Let it be your mantra as you close this year and step into the next.  . . . . For access to my weekly essays, join my ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠. . . . . Grab your daily reminder of truth over at the ⁠⁠⁠Belief Statements⁠⁠⁠ collection. . . . . Follow me on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ Drop me a note on my ⁠⁠website⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• OCT 24, 2023

Pieces of Me: How Identity Impacts Self-Belief (Part II)

Tune into Part II of my conversation with one of my best friends, ⁠Branden Polk⁠, to unpack the issue of identity. It took me decades to learn about the concept of "parts of self" and how we can not only access but integrate a full range of emotions into our identity. Branden draws from his decades of experience as a life coach, minister, and professional counselor to help us more fully understand how our self-belief is linked to our identity. Acknowledging, showing compassion and integrating all of the parts of who we are, silences shame and unleashes a belief that can overcome self-doubt. Listen in as two friends reflect on how they've watched and helped one another do that over the last decade, and where we aspire for more integration in society to have a thriving "beloved community." This special two-part conversation is equal parts old friends sharing personal and vulnerable stories of growth as well as truthful admissions and hard-gained wisdom acquired along the way. I hope this discussion leaves you with a greater understanding of self, and how valuable all of you is to all of us. . . . . Follow Rev. Branden Polk, MSW on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠. To learn more about Branden's coaching practice, and to explore whether it might be of service to you, visit: ⁠Arrowhead Advising⁠. . . . . For a deeper reflection on this conversation, join my ⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠. . . . . Grab your daily reminder of truth over at the ⁠⁠⁠Belief Statements⁠⁠⁠ collection. Use Branden10 through the end of October 2023 for 10% off site-wide as a way to honor Branden's pick, the Enough Collection. . . . . Follow me on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠. Follow me on ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠. Follow me on ⁠⁠Threads⁠⁠. Drop me a note on my ⁠⁠website⁠⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• OCT 16, 2023

Branden Polk: Pieces of Me - How Identity Impacts Self-Belief (Part I)

In this episode, I sit down with one of my best friends, Branden Polk, to unpack the issue of identity. It took me decades to learn about the concept of "parts of self" and how we can not only access but integrate a full range of emotions into our identity. Branden draws from his decades of experience as a life coach, minister, and professional counselor to help us more fully understand how our self-belief is linked to our identity. Acknowledging, showing compassion and integrating all of the parts of who we are, silences shame and unleashes a belief that can overcome self-doubt. Listen in as two friends reflect on how they've watched and helped one another do that over the last decade, and where we aspire for more integration in society to have a thriving "beloved community." This special two-part conversation is equal parts old friends sharing personal and vulnerable stories of growth as well as truthful admissions and hard-gained wisdom acquired along the way. I hope this discussion leaves you with a greater understanding of self, and how valuable all of you is to all of us. . . . . Follow Rev. Branden Polk, MSW on Instagram and ⁠LinkedIn. To learn more about Branden's coaching practice, and to explore whether it might be of service to you, visit: Arrowhead Advising. . . . . For a deeper reflection on this conversation, join my ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠. . . . . Grab your daily reminder of truth over at the ⁠⁠Belief Statements⁠⁠ collection. Use Branden10 through the end of October 2023 for 10% off site-wide as a way to honor Branden's pick, the Enough Collection. . . . . Follow me on ⁠Instagram⁠. Follow me on ⁠LinkedIn⁠. Follow me on ⁠Threads⁠. Drop me a note on my ⁠website⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• OCT 10, 2023

Depression: What I Wish I Would Have Known

In many ways, this episode was foundation for all others before it -- the inspiration for this entire podcast. And, I almost didn't record it. Not because the story isn't important; quite the opposite. But because telling such a deeply personal story took courage that it feels like I've spent years summoning. In this episode, I share my personal struggle with depression. It has lasted more than twenty years, and has brought with it shame, hopelessness, and layers of pain. However, in early 2022, I learned a valuable insight that changed my perspective on my mental and emotional health and wellbeing. I unpack this learning and it's catalytic effect on who I am today as a means of sharing hope and knowledge with you. If you, or someone you know, struggles with anxiety or depression, I hope you'll share this episode with them. If it touches one life, it will have done its job. Above all. I want to say out loud that “you’re not alone.” Please reach out anytime. The world not only wants you, it needs your light, desperately.  . . . . For access to my weekly essays, join my ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠. . . . . Grab your daily reminder of truth over at the ⁠⁠Belief Statements⁠⁠ collection. . . . . Follow me on ⁠Instagram⁠ and LinkedIn⁠ Drop me a note on my ⁠website⁠. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buildingbelief/message

• © Abby Skeans

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What is a Personal Statement?

Many schools, including colleges and universities, require an impressive personal statement (or admissions essay) before you can be accepted into your desired program. This essay focuses on your skills, experience, achievements, and education to give admissions officers a better understanding of who you are as a person and what makes you unique. It’s often short, covering between one and two pages.

Even at that volume, it could take you weeks or months to draft the document if you want to create something that will impress admissions committees around the world. Fortunately, you can achieve this with professional assistance. Whether it is from composing the perfect content to proofreading final versions, especially for people whose schedules don’t allow them enough time or freedom, these writing services can make it a breeze.

What Makes a Good Personal Statement?

“I want to write my personal statement, but don’t know if it will be good enough,” you might say. Regardless, don’t let your fear stop you. Just like everything else you will ever write in your life, writing a good personal statement is all about your perspective.

It takes a creative writer to draft compelling material. Whereby a personal statement does not reflect a student’s personality or viewpoint, it might sound like a sales pitch or a generic description of the applicant. That doesn’t mean you need to write down a lengthy and complex dissertation that details every aspect of your life.

A well-written personal statement focuses on a few points that provide a convincing overview. For example, you can discuss a major challenging situation you encountered and how you handled it or describe a specific academic milestone or creative work that demonstrates your intellectual capabilities and passion for a field. It could even include hobbies or extracurricular activities.

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Before you hire a writer for personal statement essays, understand the requirements for creating such materials. That way, you’ll set expectations for your personal statement writer. In general, drafting a personal statement is similar to writing a cover letter. You just need the right knowledge and approach.

There are things you can do all along to develop your statement and get it ready for submission. Here we look at how to do that! As much as possible, read through the application requirements and make note of what the personal statement should contain. This will help you get started.

Personal statements are of two types: response to a question and general statement of purpose.

Response to a Question Your custom personal statement might take the form of answering direct questions or prompts that are styled with the intent to know you better. Hence, your answer must align with each question’s purpose. Here are some sample questions to expect. Yours may vary.

• Do you have any specific reasons for applying to this university, and what are your goals?
• Is there a unique quality that makes your application outstanding?
• What can you bring to this institution or discipline that is currently lacking?
• Would you mind sharing anything about your history with us?
• How does your personal background or distinct viewpoint relate to this discipline? What prospects might this program offer?
• What are some of your proudest accomplishments with application reviewers that you would like to share?
• Were you drawn to this field because of a difficult background? Please share any insights you’ve gained
• How has your life been affected by overcoming adversity?
• Can you recall an experience that inspired you to pursue a career in this field?

You might find it helpful to imagine yourself talking face-to-face with someone who can decide whether or not you should be considered for the course. Keep your intentions and qualities clear when speaking. Students worry a lot about admissions officers seeing right through weak essays, but don’t worry too much.

Personal statements aren’t easy to judge automatically and admissions tutors read hundreds every year. They tend to rely more on personal impressions, rather than hard data like grades and the likes, which means there is room for you to make an impression even if your grades aren’t exceptional.

General Statement of Purpose Some of the best personal statements fall under this category. Here, your selected institution will require you to write a personal statement in broader terms — a more common term used. Although it allows applicants more freedom, there are guidelines they must strictly follow.

As a general rule, you should describe yourself more regarding your expectations from the course or how you can add value to it. You also need to tailor your personal essay to the institution’s requirements, just as you would when writing “Response to a Question.” There is one difference, though. You can reuse parts of your statement in subsequent essays.

Legitimacy and Safety of Personal Statement Writing Services

Every day more students are relying on online services to improve the quality of their documents, and personal statements are no exemptions. A little bit of help never hurts, right? Sure, but while you’re online, you risk sharing your personal details with untrusted sources. This can create a breach of confidentiality and security and could compromise your safety.

While the internet is flooded with tons of online paper writing services, not all of them are legit or safe. Some of these providers claim to offer personalized papers. Yet, they fail to deliver on their promises. And many of those who have used them report their experience as being less than excellent and regret ever hiring them.

For this reason and more, you should take precautions before contacting any professional personal statement. Reviews, such as this one are there to guide you. And whatever you do, don’t share confidential information that could compromise your identity.

Pros and Cons of Hiring a Personal Statement Writer Online

Here are some of the obvious advantages that you will get if you decide to buy personal statement:

• Relieve yourself of the burden of writing your personal statement and focus on other tasks, saving time and effort
• Spice up your paper professionally by choosing from the various options and features offered by the best personal statement writing service
• Easily maintain the quality of writing since the online writing services comprise experienced writers
• Expect a personalized, original and engaging customized essay free of plagiarism at any time
• Save more money by using discounts and get money-back offers whenever you wish

Hiring a personal statement writer for your personal statement editing also come with potential drawbacks, including the fact that:

• You can’t be sure of finding the best-custom essay writing services since they are offered by many
• If you have a tight budget, then you might require some time to find a service that is within your budget and can still deliver top-quality material. It may require several trials and errors, which could cost you more time and money
• You risk divulging your personal details to an untrustworthy source, which may result in impersonation, theft, and even a threat to life
• It could make you overdependent and less creative over time
• Consider these factors before hiring any personal statement writer service. As much as it provides freedom, you shouldn’t abuse it.

Who Will Write My Paper?

The answers depend on the online agency you hire. Reputable writing services employ experienced native speakers or certified non-native speakers who can write your personal statement perfectly. These professionals are thoroughly vetted to deliver high-quality content. This implies that your personal statement will be 100% original and on par with your school’s admission standards.

Is it Confidential to Hire Professional Personal Statement Writers?

Generally, yes. When you hire a professional personal statement writer, your information remains confidential. This means that, for one particular service you hire, the provider will not ever use your contact details, financial details or other private info to get a good name for it and attract more customers. You can submit the document as the “original writer.”

Also note that your reputation is on the line when you choose an agency, as subpar or plagiarized content can threaten your overall credibility. Hence, always hire a writing service with proven results and experience.

The Bottom Line

A personal essay is an important part of a college or university application that can make you stand out from other applicants. As such, it should be taken seriously. But if you don’t have the skills, time or freedom to pull this off, then consider hiring an online service for writing personal statement essays.

A professional writer can save you time and money by producing a high-quality writing piece that will impress your admissions officers.

The news and editorial staff of the Delco Daily Times had no role in this post’s preparation.

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