Persons and their pasts

Persons have, in memory, a special access to facts about their own past histories and their own identities, a kind of access they do not have to the histories and identities of other persons and other things. John Locke thought this special access important enough to warrant a special mention in his definition of “person,” viz., “a thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing, in different times and places...”1 In this essay I shall attempt to explain the nature and status of this special access and to defend Locke’s view of its conceptual importance. I shall also attempt to correct what now seem to me to be errors and oversights in my own previous writings on this topic.