Abstract
Most contemporary philosophical discussions of personal identity still refer to or even engage with John Locke’s account of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, the question of personal identity is essentially a question of what it means to experience oneself as a person and, more precisely, to experience oneself as the same person at different times.
The conviction which every man has of his identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it, and no philosophy can weaken it, without first producing some degree of insanity. The Philosopher, however, may very properly consider this conviction as a phaenomenon of human nature worthy of his attention.1
Thomas Reid
*I would like to thank the director of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, Prof. Dr. Ullrich Melle, for his kind permission to quote in the following from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts.
1Reid (2002), 262.
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Jacobs*, H. (2010). Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity. In: Mattens, F., Jacobs, H., Ierna, C. (eds) Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Phaenomenologica, vol 200. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0071-0_13
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