This assignment requires you to read a short passage from Hume’s essay entitled “Of Personal Identity” and to explain it’s meaning based on what you have learned from our study of his book An Enquiry Into Human Understanding. A link to this excerpt from “Of Personal Identity” appears below at the bottom of this assignment page. Introduction Read the two-page excerpt from Hume’s essay, “Of Personal Identity.” In the first paragraph, Hume describes how many people think about the self. In this essay, Hume briefly defines this common notion in the second paragraph: the self is “that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference” (Hume “Identity” 1). In other words, people typically believe the self is some thing; it is the container of our thoughts, so to speak. Thoughts and memories shift, change, come and go, but the self is the unchanging substance (to use Descartes’ term) in which these transitory mental perceptions take place. The reasoning behind this common-sense notion seems to be something like the following: “if all my thoughts are changing all the time, there must be some ‘me’ that does not change and that holds, or contains, or supports all these changing thoughts.” Descartes’ “thinking thing” is a philosophically rigorous description of this kind of self. In this essay, Hume argues that we have no good reason to believe in the existence of such a substantial self. (By “substantial self” I mean “a stable, unchanging entity, which is independent of my mental perceptions.”) In this essay Hume famously says, “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 an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume “Identity” 2). Essay Prompt Write a 500 to 600 word, double-spaced, typed essay addressing the questions below. Based on our study of An Enquiry Into Human Understanding, give a very basic explanation of Hume’s theory of the consciousness. In other words, how does he define “perceptions,” “thoughts or ideas,” and “impressions,” and how does he use these definitions to explain the way we experience the world? Include in your explanation a particular example. In other words, use Hume’s theory to describe what occurs in a person’s senses and a person’s mind when the person experiences a particular object or event. (You don’t need to deal with “association of ideas” or with the difference between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.”) How does this empiricist account of the way our minds process experience lead Hume to conclude in the excerpt from his essay “Of Personal Identity” that we have no good reason to believe in the existence of a substantial “container” self (as described above)? Integrate into your response an explanation of the main point(s) of the second, third, and fourth paragraphs in the excerpt. A note about grading: the second part of the essay, regarding the nature of the self, will carry more weight than the first part, regarding Hume’s theory of consciousness.
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