Person

The philosophical question of the identity of a person has not been posed precisely enough. Contrary to the term’s use in everyday life, and even within philosophy, the identity of a person is not a unified phenomenon. Rather, the identity of a person has to be analysed in terms of the following questions:

1. What determines the entity of a person?
2. What has to happen so that a person from yesterday is ‘identical’ to the person of today?
3. What do we regard as identity in the sense of self-understanding and self-awareness?

This book shows how in our everyday understanding the two ‘identities’ of human persons – persistence and personality – intertwine.


Michael Quante, Universität zu Köln.