![]() | Wantage, Berkshire, May 18, 1692 |
Bath, June 16, 1752 | |
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David Hume named Butler as one of the founders of modern moral philosophy.
"His major work in which he argued that objections against revealed religion may also be levelled against the whole constitution of nature."The appendix to this book contains the chapter 'Of Personal Identity', in which Butler states objections to Locke's ideas.
-- BIOGRAPHY® Online Database
"For Butler, personal identity arises through the act of comparing. And this is how he understood Locke's insight on this issue - you can see if something is identical through time if you compare it at two different moments of time. What is compared at these two moments of time? The answer should be: that which counts for personal identity. Here we have the analogy of consciousness of personal identity to that of the knowledge which does not constitute truth but 'presupposes it'. Let us try to understand what does this mean. Knowledge is always knowledge of something . One can know that something is true but this does not entail somebody to put the equal sign between the two. Therefore, truth cannot be constituted by the act of knowledge, and the same is valid for the relation between consciousness and personal identity. Knowledge, in a way, testifies for the fact that there is something true and the same with consciousness, which testifies for personal identity (for the fact that there is a what behind the consciousness) and nothing more.
Consciousness does not make personal identity but something different: personality, which I take it to be something resembling, in a sense, the character. This means that consciousness can have its fundamental role in making the way a person exists in the world, in making his/hers point of view. But this kind of project in the world does not testify in any way for the personal identity. On the contrary, personality is the person manifesting in the world. And consciousness being the intermediary between the person and the world, it would be the one building up personality and nothing more. Consciousness belongs to person and not person belongs to consciousness."
-- http://www.geocities.com/aga_10/butlervslocke.htm