ABSTRACT
I will first write quite generally about the comparison between the concept of the ‘person’ and the question of personal identity in early modern and contemporary Western philosophy and the debates over ātman in ancient and classical Indian thought. I will suggest that, while the largely psychological (and secondarily, physical and relational) notion of the ‘person’ is indeed found in the Indian material, it does not quite map on to that of the ātman, usually translated as ‘self’. I will then look more particularly at the role of arguments from memory and recognition in support of theories of personal identity in Western philosophy, and raise the question of whether the problem of implanted memories faced by such arguments has a philosophical bearing on Hindu theories of ātman invoking memory/recognition against Buddhist critiques. Thereafter, by looking closely at specific uses of memory/recognition in the schools of Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya, I will agree that any Hindu school, such as Mīmāṃsā, which uses memory/recognition for a personality-involving theory of ātman faces precisely the problems faced by Western memory theories of personal identity; this rich conception of ātman is consistent with Freschi’s account in Chapter 9 of this volume. But, by contrast, Nyāya distinguishes the ātman-self from personhood (or personality-involving senses of self), and uses memory/recognition in a quite different way – one not vulnerable to that problem. Naiyāyikas, when they invoke memory/recognition, do so in support of a minimal self phenomenally present in a stream of consciousness, which they take to establish the persistence of the ātman. Recent Western ideas about the diachronic unity of consciousness are compatible with such a use of memory/recognition. This culminating conception of self in classical Nyāya accords with other arguments for ātman made in this volume by Taber (Chapter 6) and Berger (Chapter 7).
