Three Arguments Of David Hume On Personal Identity

David Hume comes from a school of skepticism, and thus is a skeptic and a very careful thinker. He questions several concepts of the personal identity and argues that ‘I’ or the self described by Descartes is not a thing, and that there is no constant self that persists over time, and finally he mentions that human reason is inherently contradictory, and it is only through naturally instilled beliefs that we can navigate our way through common life. He uses his destructive nature to destroy the foundations of Descartes idea that the ‘I’ is a non-extended thinking thing and thus he reaches a definition for identity throughout his arguments. Throughout the text, he uses three arguments to prove that we have no idea of the self. Descartes previously claimed that the self ‘I’ is a non-extended thinking and its existence is not dependent on experiences, memories, or senses. Thus the identity of the self is preserved and will not change regardless of any experiences or memories. However, Hume

The criteria used to identify if things are the same, they consist of four parts: function, resemblance, proportion, and continuity. Let’s say you have a pen that you put in your bag for several hours, when you take it out you still think that this is the same pen but why? It’s because you learned to follow the following criteria throughout your life. You know that it’s the same pen because it still has the same function, and it still resembles the pen you put in your bag. Even if you break part of the pen, you will still think of it as the same pen due to the concept of proportion, which is how much you can add or lose of an object before you start feeling uncomfortable calling it the same thing. Lastly, we come to our last criteria which is causality and continuity, you do realize that even if you weren’t continuously looking at the pen you do realize that it continues to exist even if its in your