David Hume

Who is David Hume?

 David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He changed the spelling of his last
name from "Home" to "Hume" in 1734(so that its spelling match its pronunciation).
Hume's father died when he was only two years old; his mother expected her son to
become a lawyer.
 David Hume was known as one of the important philosophers to write in English, he was
also known in his sown time as a historian and essayist. Hume is a master stylist in all
genre his famous works are Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Enquiries concerning
Human Understanding (1748) and Principles of Morals (1751).
Who is David Hume as a Philosopher?
 David Hume was skeptical that we could learn about the world by merely thinking
about it. Hume believed that we needed to observe the world and make tentative
hypotheses, then test them against further observations. For Hume, this holds as
much for physical sciences as it did for the human sciences.
 David Hume* continued in the empiricist tradition of John Locke, believing that the
source of all genuine knowledge is our direct sense experience. As we have seen,
this empiricist approach had led Locke to a number of surprising conclusions
regarding the self, including the belief that the self’s existence is dependent on our
consciousness of it. In Locke’s view, your self is not tied to any particular body or
substance, and it only exists in other times and places because of our memory of
those experiences.
 In Hume's "On Personal Identity," David Hume argues that there is no self. In Locke's
view, the self's existence is dependent on our consciousness of another body or
substance. Hume concludes that if we examine our sense experience through the
process of introspection, we discover no self.
 A “bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Humans so
desperately want to believe that they have a unified and continuous self or soul that
they use their imaginations to construct a fictional self. But this fictional self is not
real; what we call the self is an imaginary creature, derived from a succession of
impermanent states and events. What is our mind? According to Hume, it’s “a kind
of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, re-
pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”
 According also to Hume, if we carefully examine the contents of our experience, we
find that there are only two distinct entities, “impressions” and “ideas”:
*IMPRESSIONS—Impressions are the basic sensations of our experience, the
elemental data of our minds: pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear,
exhilaration, and so on. These impressions are “lively” and “vivid.”
 -what is the difference between lively and vivid? Well lively is describing someone
or something full of life/ energy. While Vivid is describing the clarity/realism of an
image or thought.
*IDEAS—Ideas are copies of impressions, and as a result they are less “lively” and
“vivid.” Ideas include thoughts and images that are built up from our primary
impressions through a variety of relationships, but because they are derivative
copies of impressions they are once removed from reality.
* If we examine these basic data of our experience, we see that they form a
fleeting stream of sensations in our mind and that nowhere among them is the
sensation of a “constant and invariable” self that exists as a unified identity over the
course of our lives. And because the self is not to be found among these continually
changing sensations, we can only conclude that there is no good reason for believing
that the self exists.

 David Hume also argued that the self is nothing more than a series of successive
perceptions. If we are not perceiving, we are either dead or asleep, he said. Hume's
argument is logical and philosophical since we are ruled by perceptions that change and
replace one another according to time and space.
(Conclusion)

What is Hume's philosophical views about understanding the self?

 For Hume the self is an empty idea; why? Because there is no experiential continuity of self-
hood. In fact, we cannot truly experience the self at all.
 Every time we try to experience the self, we are faced with innumerable sensory experiences
such as; temperature, taste, joy, overwhelmed, hunger, scared ...
 Hume concludes that we seem to merely be a bundle of experiences, and our concept of "self "
is doesn't exist or just an illusion.
 According to Hume, thus discovery so frightening to us that we "feign", its continued existence,
and run into the notion of a soul, self, and substance, to disguise the variations.