Hume and The Self: A Critical Response

Abstract

In the discussion of personal identity, from his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume reaches a famous, if notorious conclusion: there is no self. We are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions” (T 252). My argument is that Hume's thesis on the self rests on a questionable rejection of a rival view that appears to commit the fallacy of equivocation. Along the way I identify a few possible problems with Hume's overall analysis of the self. My argument is that these diffi culties center around the conceptual apparatus Hume relies on to explain and analyze consciousness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.