Hume on Personal Identity
Hume 's view of what constitutes personal identity rests heavily upon his preceding theories concerning the nature of ideas and causation. The most important preceding ideas to take into account are the rejection of causality and necessary connection and his strict empiric stance on the basis of knowledge and the only two types of perception being ideas that are reliant on initial impressions. There will clearly be difficulty in defining and explaining 'the self ' when both the notions of causality and substance have been rejected, this results in Hume restricting himself in what he feels he can define as personal identity. Hume does not want to distinguish between the nature of personal identity and the nature of the identity we hold in single objects or ideas. Both are based in initial single impressions which the mind then assembles into a 'chimera ' of a more complex idea, constituting it 's identity. This for Hume is irrational, as there is no observable or conceivable necessary connection between past, present and future sense data, resulting in the self being strictly and thriftily described by Hume as 'a bundle of perceptions '.
The negative phase (as described by Barry Stroud) concerns the refutation of previous philosophical arguments concerning personal identity. Hume begins by establishing what he believes to be the fallacy of creating an identity of anything, not just the self. It ties in intimately with his idea of perception and causality. He uses the example of an oak tree and our perception of it from a sapling to a fully grown tree some years later, we therefore ascribe it an identity based on our contiguous perception of it. But this, as he argues in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is a fallacy due to the lack of a rational, observable and or conceivable necessary connection between ones perceptions of the tree in the past and then in the immediate present. Hume proposes that it is not rational to ascribe this tree with
The negative phase (as described by Barry Stroud) concerns the refutation of previous philosophical arguments concerning personal identity. Hume begins by establishing what he believes to be the fallacy of creating an identity of anything, not just the self. It ties in intimately with his idea of perception and causality. He uses the example of an oak tree and our perception of it from a sapling to a fully grown tree some years later, we therefore ascribe it an identity based on our contiguous perception of it. But this, as he argues in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is a fallacy due to the lack of a rational, observable and or conceivable necessary connection between ones perceptions of the tree in the past and then in the immediate present. Hume proposes that it is not rational to ascribe this tree with
Bibliography: Hume, D. A Treatise Of Human Nature. A Public Domain Book [Kindle Edition] -(As This did not have page numbers, the L. refers to the location references in the Kindle edition) Hume, D. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. A Public Domain Book [Kindle Edition], 2006. Stroud, B. Hume: The Arguments of the Philosophers. Suffolk: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, 2002. Searle, J. Mind: A Brief Introduction (Fundamentals of Philosophy). Oxford University Press [Kindle Edition] Word Count: 1454