Abstract

This paper argues that the classical debate on personal identity in analytical philosophy implicitly rests upon the untenable doctrine of philosophical atomism. Both the Cartesian Ego Theory and the Empiricist Bundle Theory are built upon the indefensible epistemological presupposition that the self is a private object of introspective knowledge. It is suggested that Peter Strawson's descriptive metaphysics of the person as a public agent contains the essential preliminaries for a non-atomistic view of personal identity