2 th - century theories of personal identity a radical variant of the “thinking animal” problem (sect 9; see Olson 1994, 2007, 122–125; Zimmerman 2003) My present stage thinks as I do, and so all objects of which it is a stage, nearly all of which are not composed by stages related by psychological continuity Thus my current thought, “I am a person,” is shared by all these objects; how I know that I am the person with the correct belief rather a non-person with a delusion of grandeur? The odds are strongly against me Secondly, while the view that all person-like individuals persist by virtue of psychological continuity has considerable intuitive appeal, one may wonder how much is preserved of that appeal in the view that, although the vast majority of person-like individuals not persist by virtue of psychological continuity, some of them (the persons) so Conclusion Since the 1990s, the personal identity debate has been much more concerned than it used to be with the ontological question of what kind of thing we are (question (c) in section 1), as well as with more general and deep metaphysical issues about, for instance, composition and persistence Although some might look back with nostalgia on the preceding era – with its obsession with fanciful science fiction examples, compared with which the fission case looks boringly realistic – this shift in focus is to be welcomed For as animalists in particular have emphasized (Olson 1994; 2007; van Inwagen 1997; 2002), it is relatively hopeless to try to answer question (a) – the question about personal identity over time – independently of question (c), and equally hopeless to try to answer question (c) independently of more general metaphysical issues As a result of this shift in focus, the psychological-continuity view is no longer the main view in the debate: it is not an answer to question (c), and it is difficult to reconcile with most sensible answers to question (c) However, the view of course still has a great many excellent champions; moreover, every rival view faces considerable problems, too Given the complexity of the issues, it is probably fair to say that no one yet knows the correct answers to the main questions of personal identity We need one more century to think things over.18 Notes Again, the debate has been dominated by questions (a) – (c), but it involves other issues as well One of these concerns the kind of identity at play when we speak of an “identity crisis”; for an influential account, see Schechtman (1996) In section 8, I will briefly consider yet another question, which concerns the reducibility of personal identity over time to physical or psychological continuity Some of these other relations will need to be construed as analogous with quasi-memory: “x carries out the quasi-intention of y,” for instance Locke similarly suggested, in support of his version of the psychological-continuity view, that “should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, 143