In this book I am trying to answer some very basic questions concerning human being. What is a person? What is individual identity, and where does it come from? What makes us the people we are? The simplicity of these questions is deceptive. It is rarely as easy to give a good answer as it is to raise a good question. But simplistic answers to these questions abound and present themselves in our unanalysed common sense of what it is to be a human person, and therefore of what is good, right, normal and acceptable in personal existence. Such quick answers are both unhelpful and cheap. They are cheap because they save us from facing difficult issues, such as the origin of our views about what is good, right, normal and acceptable in personal existence, and the practical effects which these normative constructions of personhood and personal existence have. Simplistic answers which fail to account for the complex and manifold dimensions of human life are also dangerous because they will be bound to practices which are careless of the full reality of what it means to be a person. A distorted understanding of personal existence will be tied to distortions in its practice.

These questions are intensely practical. I shall explain later why my answer to them tends to operate at a rather generalised, abstract and formalistic level and why I adopt a systematic terminology.