 Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.