Abstract

This chapter compares and contrasts Cartesian and Scholastic conceptions of the person in the seventeenth century and discusses the role that consciousness plays in these accounts. For all their differences, both Cartesian and Scholastic conceptions can be said to be “ontological” in the sense that they share a view of the self as thing or substance. Cartesians typically place a stronger emphasis on consciousness understood as relating to one's own thoughts and actions but they, like the scholastics, do not ascribe to consciousness a constitutive function for the self as a person. Also like the scholastics, Cartesians do not discuss the issue of diachronic personal identity in any detail. Moreover, there is no unitary account of individuality in Descartes and attempts to attribute first-order understanding of consciousness to Descartes fail, although such an understanding can be said to be present in later Cartesian thinkers such as La Forge, Arnauld, and Regis. Other related issues discussed include animal consciousness, and the Trinitarian context of late seventeenth-century debates on the individuality of persons, especially in the controversy between William Sherlock and Robert South. The chapter ends with a brief look at the self as an object of psychological observation in Pascal.