Abstract

I. SummaryRuth Boeker's Locke on Persons and Personal Identity is a profound treatment of Locke's views on the nature and identity of human persons. The book is divided roughly into two halves. The first half (Chapters 1–6 and 8) focuses on providing a philosophically sophisticated interpretation of Locke that engages with the most recent secondary literature. Chapter 3, for instance, includes an important contribution to scholarly debates about Locke's sortal-relative account of identity in the Essay II.xxvii.§7–8. Some (the coincidence theorists) have argued that Locke's claim that there are different persistence conditions for a ‘man’ (human animal) and the ‘mass of matter’ that occupies the same spatio-temporal location as the man entails that there are two, coincident material objects. Others (the relative identity theorists) argue that Locke holds that there is ontologically one and only one material object at any spatio-temporal location—a single object that can be attributed different identity conditions when considered under different sortals.