In the Treatise, Hume attempts to explain why we all believe that the self is a single unified entity that persists over time, a belief which Hume calls a fiction. In this paper, I demonstrate how Hume uses a type of functional explanation to account for this belief. After explicating Hume's view, I shall argue that it faces two related problems, which constitute a sort of dilemma. In the final section, I show how one of the horns of this dilemma (...) is plausibly what troubles Hume in the famous Appendix passage where he retracts his positive account of personal identity. (shrink)

How should our metaphysical commitments influence how we think of ourselves in the practical world? Hume and Buddhism share common ground in denying that there exists a metaphysically real self yet offer very different practical recommendations about how this metaphysical view ought to inform our practical identities. This paper explores the contrast between the two views. It examines the benefits and costs of embracing, and attaching to, a practical conception of the self in the absence of a metaphysical self and (...) provides a qualified defense of the Humean approach by way of considering the joys of attachment. (shrink)

This paper has three aims. The first is to subject to critical analysis the intractable debate between realists and anti-realists about the status of the so-called self, a debate that traverses various academic disciplines and discursive fields. Realism about selves has fallen on hard times of late, and the second aim of this paper is to get it back on track. Traditional substantive conceptions of the self contain ontological baggage that many moderns will be loath to carry. This paper settles (...) for a more moderate aim, a “softer” kind of self-realism derived from an unlikely source—Hume—and outlines the Humean moral self and its possible advantages. The third and subsidiary aim is to challenge the view that recent “narrative” conceptions of selfhood have made the old realism versus anti-realism debate redundant. “Narrativism” about selves turns out to do little more than recycle old arguments in fancy new packages. (shrink)

In the post‐Kohlbergian era of moral education, a ‘moral gap’ has been identified between moral cognition and moral action. Contemporary moral psychologists lock horns over how this gap might be bridged. The two main contenders for such bridge‐building are moral emotions and moral selves. I explore these two options from an Aristotelian perspective. The moral‐self solution relies upon an anti‐realist conception of the self as ‘identity’, and I dissect its limitations. In its stead, I propose a Humean conception of the (...) moral self which preserves Aristotelian insights into the difference between self and identity, yet remains closer to modern sensitivities. According to such a conception, the moral‐self versus moral‐emotions dichotomy turns out to be illusory. Finally, I show some of the practical implications of this conception for moral education. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the context and significance of the first instalment of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature , Books One and Two, on the understanding and on the passions, published in 1739 without Book Three. I argue that Books One and Two taken together should be read as addressing the question of the relation between reason and passion, and place Hume's discussion in the context of a large early modern philosophical literature on the topic. Hume's goal is (...) to show that the passions do not require government by reason, and to illustrate various ways in which the passions of social beings regulate themselves. The underlying theme of the first Treatise is thus a new theory of sociability: sympathetic sociability. (shrink)

Hume’s concept of sympathy is often discussed in isolation from the concept of comparison, which plays an important role in his social and moral philosophy. If both concepts are discussed at all in...

The paper advances the hypothesis that David Hume’s philosophy explains the corporeal dimension of the self, particularly, one’s belief in a body as being ‘her own body’, as a part of one’s self, in light of three different perspectives: through the operations of the imagination, the associative principles and the perception of mental and physical parallel states; through the occurrence of certain passions in the mind, particularly, pride, humility, and self-interest which direct one’s attention to a body that is felt (...) to be her own body; through the consciousness of the ability of the will to guide the power of moving certain parts of the body. Finally, it is argued that the mental phenomenon of belief in one's own body is a mutual construction of the human mind, that is, it is produced simultaneously by intellectual, affective, and volitional operations. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also (...) takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us. (shrink)

Hume’s “impressions of reflection” is a category made up of all our non-sensory feelings, including “the passions and other emotions.” These two terms for affective mental states, ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’, are both used frequently in Hume’s work, and often treated by scholars as synonymous. I argue that Hume’s use of both ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ in his discussions of affectivity reflects a conceptual distinction implicit in his work between what I label ‘attending emotions’ and ‘fully established passions.’ The former are the (...) transient, changeable, valenced feelings that flow between perceptions and constitute their felt nature and impulse. The latter are the particular passions fully realized, with characteristic valence, and analyzed by Hume in terms of their particular belief structures and relations between ideas and impressions understood to be constituent of particular passions. The term ‘emotion’ for Hume generally denotes either the attending feeling, sometimes distinct from the passion (particularly as ‘passion’ is being used to include the associated beliefs, causes and objects), or as a synonym for a particular passion, typically when Hume is primarily referring to the felt nature of the passion. Generally speaking, ‘passion’ is a more cognitive category of affective mental state, while ‘emotion’ is more sensationalist. I will further argue that when we grant Hume the emotion/passion distinction, he can accommodate both highly sensationalist and highly cognitivist understandings of affective mental states. I finish with the application of my distinction to two key topics in Hume studies: his sympathy mechanism, and his theory of belief and motivation. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Hume’s theory of pride and the ‘remarkable mechanism’ of sympathy. In the first part of the paper I outline the ways in which Hume’s theory can accommodate the sense in which the passions are directed on things or possess intentionality while still holding to his view that passions are simple feelings. In the second part of the paper I consider a problem internal to Hume’s account of pride which arises in his discussion of the love (...) of fame and the functioning of sympathy; I explain how the tensions can be reconciled by recognising that Hume’s theory of sympathy is more nuanced than has commonly been recognized. In the third part I turn back to the evaluation of Hume’s theory of pride and argue that while it is unfair to complain that Hume does not make self-evaluation a central component of pride, Hume’s treatment of the idea of self in his theory of the passions is inadequate because he can make no proper room for the phenomenon of vicarious pride. (shrink)