personal identity

English

Noun

personal identity (uncountable)

1. (philosophy) The criteria for the persistence of persons over time (i.e what makes one the same person as one was yesterday, or ten years ago), and the criteria for the individuation of persons from others.
   • 2002, Don Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy, page 163:

     It was largely in order to defend the justice of divine rewards and punishments in the face of his own relative agnosticism about substantial souls that Locke offered his reductive empiricist analysis of personal identity in terms of consciousness and memory.