General problems about identity had been discussed long before the early modern period, but the problem of personal identity in the form in which it is so widely discussed today has its origin in John Locke's (1632–1704) chapter "Of Identity and Diversity," which he added to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Indeed, most early twenty-first-century views on the issue were anticipated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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