What was Hume's Problem with Personal Identity?

Abstract

An appreciation of Hume's psychology of object identity allows us to recognize certain tensions in his discussion of the origin of our belief in personal identity-tensions which have gone largely unnoticed in the secondary literature. This will serve to provide a new solution to the problem of explaining why Hume finds that discussion of personal identity so problematic when he famously disavows it in the Appendix to the Treatise. It turns out that the two psychological mechanisms which respectively generate the ideas of object and of personal identity are mutually incompatible. It is this sort of conflict within Hume's introspective or subjectivist psychology which is the source of his worry. Hume's views about identity tend to be interpreted without much attention being paid to the psychological concerns of the Treatise. It is important, however, to have a good grasp of Hume's psychology of identity ascriptions in order to interpret properly his metaphysical views about identity. By keeping his psychology in view, we are less likely to make the mistake of attributing to Hume a temporal parts view of identity through time.' The focus of this paper will be a further dividend of this interpretive strategy. I contend that an appreciation of Hume's psychology of object identity allows us to recognize certain tensions in his discussion of ascriptions of personal identity. This will serve to provide a new solution to the perennial problem of explaining why Hume finds that discussion of personal identity so problematic when he famously disavows it in the Appendix to the Treatise. It turns out that the two psychological mechanisms which respectively generate the ideas of object and of personal identity are mutually incompatible. It is