There is a long tradition, dating at least from Reid (1785), for arguing that the identity of persons over time is not a matter of convention or degree in the way that the identity of other (complex) substances is and that this shows that the self is a different kind of entity from any physical body. Criticism of these arguments and of the intuitions on which they rest, running from Hume to Parfit (1970: 1984), have left us with an inconclusive clash of intuitions. The argument under considerati