Tesis
Hume e o problema da identidade pessoal
Fecha
2017-03-08Autor
Santos, Susie Kovalczyk dos
Institución
Resumen
This dissertation investigates the personal identity problem on David Hume’s writings on
Treatise of Human Nature. For this aim, I present the Humean conception of self concerning
the operations of the understanding and of the passions or emotions, as well as two
interpretative controversies arising from it. Once Hume considers the notion of substance
unintelligible, and denies that there is an impression that is one and the same throughout one’s
life, he considers imperfect, in section Of personal identity, the attribution of identity and
simplicity to the self. All we have access about the mind are the sucessive experiences or
perceptions, related through associative qualities which leads us to tend to believe in the unity
of the self. If there is something beyond the sucessive perceptions which unites them, it
cannot be discovered through experience. The first interpretative controversy in question
concerns if, from one side, much of what Hume proposes in Book I is reaffirmed by him in
the Appendix, from the other side, he claims there is one aspect that his theory was not
successful in explaining. However, when he sets the problem, for which he admits he does not
find a viable solution, the principles that he claims he cannot either reconcile or reject are not
incompatibles with each other and also they are relevant to other issues addressed in the
Treatise, not restricting their impact to the problem of personal identity. What, then, is the
problem that Hume identifies in his theory of personal identity in Book I? Hume reintroduces
the notion of self throughout Book II, this time as an object of pride, stating at times that we
not only have an idea of self, but also an impression. The second controversy, therefore,
concerns whether there are different notions of self in the Treatise, one presupposed by pride
and another produced by it, or if Hume develops different aspects of the same conception of
self, so that the self as a bundle of perceptions is the same implied by sympathy and produced,
as an object, by pride. This dissertation unrolls and argues these problems, seeking to present
how Hume's writings in books I and II on the notion of self complement each other and to
what extent the human natural propensity to attribute simplicity and identity to the self is due
not only to the similarity, causality and memory, as defended in Book I, but also due to the
passions.