The notion of life and the idea of being, in general, has been debated for thousands of years. However, very little agreement has been reached on the nature of life and the source and extent of human agency. The presence of multiple religious standpoints on life, death, and the concept of a soul do not help in addressing the subject matter, either. However, if there was a character who, having died, is immediately reincarnated into a new body, most philosophers holing a physical view of a personal identity, such as Locke, Parfit, Descartes, would likely have to agree that a reincarnated man would represent an entirely different being from the one that it embodied before the reincarnation.
Due to the purely physical perspective on defining a man, most of the philosophers in question would have had to concede that inhabiting a new mode would suggest living completely anew. Indeed, the existing records show that Locke held similar views concerning the reincarnation of an individual into an animal (Matlock, 2019). Specifically, Locke argued that, once having been transformed into a hog, one no longer remains a human being (Matlock, 2019). Therefore, it would be reasonable to suggest that Locke would have also viewed the transportation of an individual’s soul from one body to another a rebirth.
In turn, Descartes’ response might not have been just as brutally unequivocal, but he would have been likely to point to the same direction of thought as well. Namely, his famous statement concerning the ability to think as the presence of life (“I think, therefore, I am” (Fernández-Armesto, 2019, p. 214)) implies that the presence of mind does not necessarily have to correlate with the presence of a body. Thus, in Descartes’ philosophy, the body and the mind may be taken as separate notions, which would imply that the existence of a mind in a different body could be a possibility. Therefore, Descartes would have been more lenient toward the concept of reincarnation than Locke would. However, Parfit would have likely declined the notion of reincarnation as absurd, pointing to the fact that personality and other characteristics of personal identity were linked inherently to biological characteristics.
References
Fernández-Armesto, F. (2019). Out of our minds: What we think and how we came to think it. University of California Press.
Matlock, J. G. (2019). Signs of reincarnation: Exploring beliefs, cases, and theory. Rowman & Littlefield.