PHIL 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Personal Identity, Old Age
20 Feb 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Personal identity (Hume)
Thursday, February 9, 2017
10:36 AM
Opposed Descartes' "I think therefore I am"
• 1774-1776
• Like James, said we should introspect
• Unable to come up with a principle that makes each of us unique
o I have many ideas and am many things: parent, child, philosopher, someone who
loves the colour blue
o Like James pointed out: we have many social selves
o Our sensations change
We must define "identity"
We're conflating an identity with numerous properties and a succession of different objects
• We are the latter
o Toddler self, teen self, middle aged self, senior citizen self etc.
There is no fixed self, we change over time
[TUTR]
Debate: James' self vs Hume's self
James
1. James: We have one self; there's different parts dominated by the ego
• There are 4 constituents of the empirical self: social (the way we act), spiritual (our values,
desires, emotions), material (our physical body, clothing), and then the ego
• The EGO puts all of them together --> the unifier that Hume says doesn't exist
o It allows us to evaluate ourselves
2. Hume: we have many different selves that build upon one another throughout our lives
• Denies that we are in any part a product of nature, our self is entirely accounted to
nurture (circumstance) --> does this not then imply that we lack an identity when we are
born?
3. Hume says there is no unifier, that we constantly change
• The ego is important bc the different selves influence one another
o Ex. social self is influenced by the spiritual self, material self is influenced by the
social self
• See someone being bullied: your social self may be shy but your spiritual self
tells you it's morally right to
o It keeps us in check, gives us a sense of morality
• We're ot sayig e’re ostatly the sae, e hage ut e still hae a small part of us
that keeps us essentially the same
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