What makes us the same person across time? The different solutions to this problem known as personal identity can be divided into two camps: A numerical and a practical approach. While the former asks for the conditions of identity based on the question “what is a person?,” the latter is concerned with what we identify with in everyday life as essential in order to form a narrative of one’s life as a whole based on the question “who am I?” However, by emphasizing the cognitive and/or experiential capacities as the sole condition for self or personhood, both approaches fail to offer an adequate account of birth and death. The one being born is not yet someone with such cognitive capacities and the one who dies is unable to experience his or her own death. By invoking conceptual frameworks of Kierkegaard and Romano, I argue that birth and death must be considered both as events and conditions constitutive of personal identity rather than a set of derivative problems arising from an already established definition of self or person.

是什么让我们在同一时间成为同一个人？解决此问题的不同方法称为个人身份可以分为两个阵营：一种数值方法和一种实际方法。前者基于“什么是一个人？”这个问题来询问身份的条件，而后者则关注我们在日常生活中所认为的基本内容，以便基于人类的整体来描述自己的生活。问题“我是谁？” 然而，通过强调认知和/或体验能力作为自我或人格的唯一条件，这两种方法都无法充分说明出生和死亡的情况。出生的人尚未具有这种认知能力，而死亡的人无法经历自己的死亡。通过引用Kierkegaard和Romano的概念框架，我认为出生和死亡必须同时被视为事件和条件 构成个人身份，而不是因已经建立的自我或人的定义而引起的一系列衍生问题。