PHI101: Introduction To Philosophy, Elements Of Personal Identity

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Concept of a Person
The concept of a person is one that raises quite a number of questions and most of them philosophical. Ideally, there is the religious approach that is largely associated with dualism. This is to mean that the definition of a person is both the body and their soul. When one dies, their soul is seen to have left their body. It is this separation that signals the end of life of the body and the continuity on the soul into the spirit world, which depicts going into a different realm altogether. Monism on the other hand is a concept that is tied to the boy being one entity devoid of the soul. This is with relative opinion associated with the lack thereof in evidence that there is soul (Anderson, 2018). As such, the spatial-temporal continuity of a person when they are dead and they are alive is brought to question.
This brings to the debate the elements of personal identity. Being a concept that was first brought to light by Locke and then later on elaborated and expounded on by Leibniz, it is one that raises the bar on understanding the concept of a person. From the time one is born, there are a myriad of changes that take place up until when one dies as an adult. This raises the question as to whether, when one is a baby, they are still the same person given the changes that take place to their being. They start out as sperms and ova and end up as human being that capable of giving rise to life themselves (OpenLearn, 2018). When a person changes through the various stages of development, do they still remain the same? If a car is stripped off most of the original pasts and replaced with new spare ones, does it still remain the same car? These are questions that plague the concept of identity of a person. This is a concept that has some intrinsic elements...