Personal identity

One topic that I have had to leave almost completely untouched in this book is the question what each of our philosophers would say accounts for personal identity or persistence of the self over time. Here is the briefest of catalogues of the answers I believe would be given. Criteria of personal identity are often said to fall into broadly two types: a criterion that stresses physical persistence of the body or one where psychological continuity is crucial. It could be said that each of our six thinkers (with the possible exception of Spinoza) adopts his own, highly distinctive psychological criterion.

Descartes

Descartes appears to have been very little interested in the subject of personal identity but if pressed to designate a principle of identity for the self he would say that personal survival for him is a matter of the persistence of the mind or rational soul. Since on Descartes's view the immaterial soul could exist even if there were no bodies of any kind, survival of human bodily death by the self is for him a genuine possibility. However, as far as I am aware he never says anything from which we could deduce whether or not he thinks it would be me surviving if at some future time my rational soul, although conscious, retained no memories or consciousness of any of my life or personal details.