Abstract

Recent decades have seen an increasing tendency to exclude the phenomenon of personality from the metaphysical investigation of personal identity. We are advised not to confuse personal identity as a philosophical subject, namely as the metaphysical issue of specifying what it is that makes a person staying numerically self-identical over time, with the psychological question of 'personal identity' which asks what makes someone the individual person they are with their particular character and history. However, one might be unsatisfied with this. If (as common sense takes for granted) persons are to be conceived as beings possessing a personality, should there not be some more than superficial connection between personality and personal identity in the philosophical sense? This paper investigates this question by revealing the guiding - metaphysical assumptions behind the claim that personality and personal identity must be treated separately as well as by presenting the metaphysical alternative brushed aside by the adherents of this claim. In fact, I argue, there are two opposing views of the relation between personality and personal identity, these being grounded in two opposing metaphysical models of what a person is: the substance model and the bundle model of the person. However, it turns out that ultimately both competing models fail for fundamental reasons, which raises the question of what a way out of the dilemma might look like.