Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness

In Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness , Brian Garrett presents an original and comprehensive theory of persons: their nature, their values, and their consciousness. He begins by proposing a new theory of personal identity over time. Next, he defends the importance of personal identity against recent sceptical attack. And finally, Garrett explores the nature of self-consciousness by examining the elusive pronoun ‘I’ and the various grounds of what our ‘I’ judgements mean. Brian Garrett places recent discussions of personal identity in a broader context, and links the question of the understanding of persons with other central issues in philosophy, notably the problem of self-consciousness and ethical questions relating to our nature as persons. Garrett manages to tackle a technical and complex discussion with jargon-free and elegant language. This is the first book of its kind to bring together the many different topics that surround the discussion of personal identity. Brian Garrett makes an important and original contribution to the study of philosophy of personal identity, the philosophy of mind, and to epistemology.