The Doctrine of Act and Potency is the Key to an Adequate Understanding of Persistence in Identity

Abstract

The question "why should I treat my workmate the same if she is not the same person we employed?" remains a funny but crucial question. For if individuals change over time, why should we treat them the same? While some philosophers argue that there is no persistence in identity, others say that there is persistence in identity, and they propose properties like body, name, memory, and psychological connectedness as those essential properties that persist over time. This paper looks critically at some of these positions and would argue that they are all insufficient to account for persistence in identity for various reasons, but the main reason is that they ascribe personal identity to things that are either changeable or can be lost. This paper suggests that to understand the property that persists over time and how and why it persists over time, there must be an in-depth understanding of the doctrine of act and potency proposed by Aristotle. This paper also explains why this debate is still relevant in our contemporary world and further suggests what we could investigate from here.