Abstract

In this dissertation, I position John Locke's problem of personal identity in relation to three distinct philosophical approaches taken in the Seventeenth Century to the problems of personal immortality and the afterlife. Locke considers in his treatment of identity three philosophical accounts of personal immortality, viz., Cartesian dualism, Hobbesian materialism, and the Cambridge Platonism of Henry More, and rejects each. In separate chapters, I develop each of these accounts focusing on ontology, theories of perception and memory, relation to Aristotelian thinkers , and understandings of theology and theological doctrines. In each chapter, I examine Locke's treatment of each philosophical approach in his analysis of personal identity. Locke rejects the "substance" accounts and replaces them with an analysis of consciousness and memory that can survive the change of material and immaterial substance integral to his understanding of the doctrines of bodily resurrection and personal immortality. I argue in the final chapter that once situated in its appropriate context, Locke exhibits resources on which to draw in response to three commonly considered fatal objections made to his theory by philosophers such as Thomas Reid and Bishop Joseph Butler