Abstract

In "Of Personal Identity,", Hume attempts to explain how one arrives at the fiction of a substantial self which retains its numerical identity through time. In "Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses," Hume offers a similar explanation of the origin of another fiction - that of objects which enjoy a continued and distinct existence. In this paper, I will argue that his pair of parallel explanations does not jointly account for the pair of fictions to be explained.