Hume on Personal Identity

Abstract

A person is sometimes said to have no strong sense of his own identity. What that usually means is that he lacks some of the things that give inner stability and continuity to a human life: for instance, he may be uncertain about his beliefs, feelings and desires; he may not know the sort of person that he is, or the sort of person that he wants to be. But there is also another way in which a person may lose the sense of his own identity: he may be afflicted with amnesia and simply forget who he is. Someone in this situation would probably need the help of the police in order to re-establish his own identity, and, of course, he would want them to tell him not only the sort of person that he was, but also the particular person that he was. These two pieces of information are connected with one another, and in Nigel Dennis’s novel Cards of Identity the victims are deprived of both at once. But it is easy to see that they are different things, and the philosophical problem of personal identity is in fact concerned with only one of them — particular identity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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