Enlightenment Philosophy In A Nutshell by Jane O'Grady

Author:Jane O'Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781789506457
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Published: 2018-12-21T14:32:02+00:00

Self and personal identity

Applying the impression test to the self is also devastating. Since Hume has made the body simply a series of impressions that are on a par with the impressions supposedly outside it, he would seem to be cast back on a Cartesian self that is having these interchangeable impressions. But, inevitably, although we seem to have an idea of the self, we don’t really count as having that idea because there is no impression from which to derive it. Some philosophers, Hume agrees, ‘imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF’; for his part, however, ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.’ In fact, says Hume, if your mind were reduced to a lower grade of existence than an oyster’s, and had only one perception, you would still have no coherent sense of self or be able to perceive anything more than that one perception.

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