Chapter 14 Further Reading: Who Am I?

Primary Sources

John Locke — Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 27 (1689) The founding text of the psychological continuity theory of personal identity. Locke distinguishes personal identity from the identity of man (biological organism) and argues that memory-based consciousness is the criterion. Surprisingly readable for a seventeenth-century text. Start here if you want the historical foundations.

Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons, Part III: "Personal Identity" (1984) The most important work in analytic philosophy of personal identity in the twentieth century. Parfit's thought experiments (teleporter, fission, brain transplants) and his radical conclusions are developed with extraordinary care and rigor. Challenging but accessible to a determined reader. Part III can be read independently. This is one of the most philosophically transformative books of the modern era.

Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue, Chapter 15: "The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition" (1981) MacIntyre's account of narrative identity, embedded in his broader argument about virtue ethics and moral tradition. The chapter on the unity of a human life is where the narrative identity account is most directly developed.

Paul Ricoeur — Oneself as Another (1992) Ricoeur's full treatment of narrative identity and the idem/ipse distinction. More technically demanding than MacIntyre, but philosophically richer. For readers who want the complete account.

Contemporary Philosophy

Eric Olson — The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology (1997) The most rigorous defense of the animalist (bodily continuity) view of personal identity. Olson argues that we are biological organisms, not psychological continuers, and that Parfit and Locke are fundamentally mistaken. Important for understanding the full range of positions.

Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne — Personal Identity (1984) A classic debate between two philosophers with opposing views. Shoemaker defends psychological continuity; Swinburne defends a soul-based view. Excellent for seeing the major positions in direct confrontation.

Jennifer Radden (ed.) — The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion (2004) Includes essays on personal identity and its connections to psychiatric conditions — amnesia, dissociation, dementia — that bring the philosophical questions into direct contact with clinical reality.

Marya Schechtman — The Constitution of Selves (1996) Develops a narrative self-constitution view that is more rigorous than popular accounts. Schechtman argues that to be a person is to have a self-constituting narrative of a particular kind. Important for readers who want a fuller treatment of narrative identity.

Buddhist and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Mark Siderits — Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (2003) The most philosophically rigorous engagement with Buddhist no-self from the analytic tradition. Siderits argues that the Buddhist position is defensible and illuminating, and draws connections with Parfit's conclusions. Demanding but excellent.

Jay Garfield — The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (1995) Nagarjuna's 2nd-century CE philosophical argument for emptiness, which extends the no-self doctrine to all phenomena. Garfield's translation and commentary make this accessible. The introduction is essential reading for understanding the philosophical context.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch — The Embodied Mind (1991) A groundbreaking work connecting Buddhist cognitive science with Western phenomenology and cognitive science. Argues that the self is enacted through embodied experience rather than being a pre-given substance. Deeply rewarding for readers willing to engage across disciplines.

Social and Political Identity

Simone de Beauvoir — The Second Sex, Introduction and Part I: "Destiny" (1949) The foundational text for understanding how gender is socially constructed rather than naturally given. The Introduction ("Woman as Other") and Part I remain among the most powerful pieces of philosophical writing of the 20th century.

Charles Taylor — The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) Taylor's accessible treatment of authenticity and its misunderstandings. Argues that authenticity is a genuine moral ideal that modern culture both rightly prizes and routinely debases. Short and highly readable. Directly relevant to the social identity section of this chapter.

Kwame Anthony Appiah — The Ethics of Identity (2005) A philosopher's examination of identity politics and the ethics of identity claims. Appiah is characteristically balanced — sympathetic to the importance of social identity while critical of its misuse. Excellent on the relationship between individual identity and group membership.

Sally Haslanger — Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012) A collection of essays by one of the leading philosophers working on social ontology — the question of what social categories are and how they function. Rigorous and clearly written.

Psychology and Neuroscience

Dan McAdams — The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (1993) The psychologist who has done the most to develop narrative identity as an empirical theory. McAdams argues that in midlife, humans construct personal myths that integrate their past, present, and projected future into a coherent story. Highly accessible and rich with case material.

Antonio Damasio — The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999) A neuroscientist's account of how consciousness and the sense of self are constructed from embodied processes. Connects to Buddhist insights about the processual, constructed character of the self. Readable and important.

Michael Gazzaniga — Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011) The leading researcher on split-brain patients — whose cases provide real-world analogues of Parfit's fission thought experiment — reflects on personal identity, free will, and the nature of the self. Very accessible.

Carol Dweck — Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) The foundational text on fixed vs. growth mindsets — directly relevant to the chapter's conclusion that the self is more malleable than a fixed-self belief suggests. The research is solid and the applications are extensive.

Memoir and Literature

Nabokov, Vladimir — Speak, Memory (1951) One of the greatest autobiographical works in English, built around the author's attempt to recover and understand his own past self. A literary enactment of the narrative identity approach, asking what memory makes of us and what we make of memory.

Styron, William — Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) A harrowing and beautifully written account of severe depression. Relevant to the personal identity question: who are you when the illness has taken over? Is the depressed self "you" in the same sense as the well self?

Beckett, Samuel — Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1951–53) Beckett's trilogy is, among other things, a sustained literary investigation of the dissolution of personal identity — characters who cannot maintain a coherent sense of who they are, narrators who cannot be sure whether they are who they think they are. Not philosophy but enacts the philosophical questions with incomparable power.

A Note on Sequence

If you read only one thing: Parfit's Reasons and Persons, Part III. It is the most important philosophical work on personal identity of the past century, and its conclusions are genuinely transformative.

If you read two: Add MacIntyre's After Virtue, Chapter 15, for the narrative identity account that Parfit's purely psychological account misses.

If you want the psychological science: Dan McAdams's The Stories We Live By is the best bridge between the philosophical theories and the empirical research on how narrative identity actually functions in people's lives.