Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of persons through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is sometimes referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.
Identity is an issue for both continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. A key question in continental philosophy is in what sense we can maintain the modern conception of identity, while realizing many of our prior assumptions about the world are incorrect.
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Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or identity:
“Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)
“Growing has no connection with audience. / Audience has no
connection with identity. / Identity has no
connection with a universe. / A universe has no
connection with human nature.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)