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Hume used the term "bundle" in this sense, also referring to the personal identity, in his main work: "I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement". [3]
For example, Hume's views on personal identity do not appear. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained. This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today.
Hume also offers a sceptical theory of personal identity and a compatibilist account of free will. Isaiah Berlin wrote of Hume that "no man has influenced the history of philosophy to a deeper or more disturbing degree". [2] Jerry Fodor wrote of Hume's Treatise that it is "the foundational document of cognitive science". [3]
This is because the no-self theory rejects all theories of the self, even the bundle theory. On Giles' reading, Hume is actually a no-self theorist and it is a mistake to attribute to him a reductionist view like the bundle theory. Hume's assertion that personal identity is a fiction supports this reading, according to Giles.
Hume's theory is often interpreted as involving an ontological claim about what selves actually are, which goes beyond the semantic claim about what the word "self" means. But others contend that this constitutes a misinterpretation of Hume since he restricts his claims to the epistemic and semantic level.
Hume was born on 26 April 1711, as David Home, in a tenement on the north side of Edinburgh's Lawnmarket.He was the second of two sons born to Catherine Home (née Falconer), daughter of Sir David Falconer of Newton, Midlothian and his wife Mary Falconer (née Norvell), [14] and Joseph Home of Chirnside in the County of Berwick, an advocate of Ninewells.
Against such interpretation is the fact that Hume himself in Section II calls the "missing shade of blue" as a «proof, that the simple ideas are not always, in every instance, derived from the correspondent impressions», [1] where in Section VI he defines "proof" as not a demonstrative argument but as an argument from experience that «leaves ...
…in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and 'tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was ...