Personal Identity

People often use the phrase; I am only human, as an excuse for making mistakes. We all know and understand what it means to be a human yet when it comes to defining what makes us a human, the question does not yield an effortless answer. Though often assumed to be obvious and clear, the concept of personhood is neither. For more than centuries, philosophers have tried to answer the age-old question of what is a person? Most attempts to define personhood have included that the human person must be able to express some form of consciousness or rationality but as the qualities of personhood show a diminution, the existence of diminished persons is considered. By investigating the criteria of personhood, we can investigate what makes a person, a person.

The issue of personal identity and its determents has always been of concern for many philosophers. Questions are raised as what is a human being and what does being the person that you are, from one day to the next, necessarily consist of. Personal Identity theory is the philosophical confrontation with the ultimate questions of our existence such as who are we and what makes us who we are. This investigation over what makes us, us question the conditions for the identity of the person over time. As we change, every day, mentally and psychically, are we still the same person? And do the conditions that constitute our personhood stay the same? A patient suffering Alzheimer's disease is slowly losing the conditions that make them a certain person. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterise a given person at one time. (Nimbalkar, 2011)