Hume: Consciousness

David Hume’s philosophical work presents the reader with a perplexing mix of constructive accounts of empirically guided belief and destructive sceptical arguments against all belief. This book reconciles this conflict by showing that Hume intended his scepticism to be remedial. It immunizes us against the influence of “unphilosophical” causes of belief, determining us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence. In making this case, this book develops Humean positions on topics Hume did not discuss in detail but that are of (...) interest to contemporary philosophers: consciousness and the unity of consciousness, temporal experience, visual spatial perception, the experience of colour and other qualia, objective experience, and spatially extended minds. It also challenges currently accepted interpretations of Hume’s views on the finite divisibility of space and time, vacuum, the duration of unchanging objects, and identity over time. It deals with criticisms of Hume that were raised by his contemporaries, notably by Thomas Reid, draws attention to earlier seventeenth‑ and eighteenth‑century work that has bearing on the interpretation of Hume’s thought, and compares Hume’s achievements with those of later nineteenth‑century psychologists and philosophers. (shrink)

Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength has been (...) largely overlooked in favor of mental states’ type, representational contents, domain-specific phenomenology, or processes such as attention. Considering mental strength in our reflections about the mind illuminates debates about the relation of representational contents and phenomenal character, and it also helps address questions about the structure and functions of consciousness. Mental strength provides a unifying construct to model what is shared in the phenomenology of different types of conscious experiences. (shrink)

The thesis of self-elusiveness says, roughly, that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest from the first-person perspective. This thesis has a long history. Yet many who endorse it do so only in a very specific sense. They say that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest as an object from the first-person perspective; they say that self-experience is not a species of ‘object-consciousness’. Yet if consciousness outstrips object-consciousness, then we are left with the possibility that there is another sense (...) in which the self is phenomenally manifest. Alas, efforts to articulate just what this form of self-experience comes to—often a holy grail of sorts for those in, and influenced by, the phenomenological tradition—have remained stubbornly obscure. This essay attempts a partial remedy. Taking a cue from Bernard Lonergan, I suggest that self-experience, while not a species of object-consciousness, is nonetheless partially grounded in it. The result is a view that is compatible with self-experience being representational and relational, contra tradition. (shrink)

I argue that the Hume of the Treatise maintains an account of knowledge according to which (i) every instance of knowledge must be an immediately present perception (i.e., an impression or an idea); (ii) an object of this perception must be a token of a knowable relation; (iii) this token knowable relation must have parts of the instance of knowledge as relata (i.e., the same perception that has it as an object); and any perception that satisfies (i)-(iii) is an instance (...) of knowledge. I then apply this account to the case of sense perception. I argue that Hume holds that relations of impressions can be intuited, are knowable, and are necessary. For Hume, these relations constitute sensory knowledge. While Hume is rightly labeled an empiricist for many reasons, a close inspection of his account of knowledge reveals yet another way in which he deserves the label. (shrink)

If one looks for the notion of conscience in Hume, there appears to be a contrast between the loose use of it that can be found in his History of England, and the stricter use of it Hume makes in his philosophical works. It is my belief that, notwithstanding the problems Hume’s philosophy raises for a notion such as conscience, it is possible to frame a positive Humean explanation of it. I want to suggest that, far from corresponding to a (...) mental power or to a faculty of some sort, conscience for Hume can be understood as a reflective form of self-surveying. This becomes apparent if the discussion about conscience as presented in A Treatise of Human Nature is integrated with other notions Hume introduces in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals when discussing the case of the ‘sensible knave’, such as those of inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, and reflection on one’s own conduct. To further explicate my line of argument, I shall also contrast Hume’s conclusions with some arguments presented by other authors in this regard, such as Bernard Mandeville and Joseph Butler. (shrink)

This article investigates Hume's account of mental transparency. In this article, I will endorse Qualitative Transparency – that is, the thesis that we cannot fail to apprehend the qualitative characters of our current perceptions, and these apprehensions cannot fail to be veridical – on the basis that, unlike its competitors, it is both weak enough to accommodate the introspective mistakes that Hume recognises, and yet strong enough to make sense of his positive employments of mental transparency. Moreover, Qualitative Transparency is (...) also philosophically satisfying in providing good philosophical reason for why the mental states that are incorrigible should in fact be so. (shrink)

Although ambivalence in a strict sense, according to which a person holds opposed attitudes, and holds them as opposed, is an ordinary and widespread phenomenon, it appears impossible on the common presupposition that persons are either unitary or plural. These two conceptions of personhood call for dispensing with ambivalence by employing tactics of harmonizing, splitting, or annulling the unitary subject. However, such tactics are useless if ambivalence is sometimes strictly conscious. This paper sharpens the notion of conscious ambivalence, such that (...) the above tactics cannot be applied to ordinary moments of explicit and clear ambivalent consciousness. It is shown that such moments reveal ambivalence as an attitude that is part of human life. The argument employs three features of consciousness that together capture its outgoing character. In the last section some of the implications of conscious ambivalence for consciousness and the mind are clarified as the analysis of conscious ambivalence in this paper is compared with Hume’s and John Barth’s phenomenalist conceptions. -/- An additional note: See Razinsky, Ambivalence: A Philosohical Exploration (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2016), Ch. 5 for a version of this paper that also includes a long section on the unity of consciousness (but does not include the section named 'Phenomenalist Ambivalence?'). (shrink)

In this paper, I return to the well-known apparent inconsistencies in Hume’s treatment of personal identity in the three books of A Treatise of Human Nature, and try to defend a Humean narrative interpretation of the self. I argue that in Book 1 of the Treatise Hume is answering (to use Marya Schechtman’s expressions in The Constitution of Selves) a “reidentification” question concerning personal identity, which is different from the “characterization” question of Books 2 and 3. That is, I maintain (...) that whereas in Book 1 Hume is using his philosophical empiricism to provide his own version of the problem of how to recognize persons as the same at different times, in Books 2 and 3 he is presenting selves from a different, both sentimental and ethical standpoint, as the focus of people’s concerns. I start by discussing Hume’s notion of personal identity as presented in Book 1 and in the “Appendix.” I then specify the narrative conception of the self Hume relies on when dealing with passions and morality as the self-consciousness persons develop as bearers of characters of or about which they can be morally proud or humble. I finally conclude by distinguishing Hume’s narrative self from the idea of “the unity of human life” that Alasdair MacIntyre puts forward in After Virtue. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also (...) takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us. (shrink)

In The Early Modern Subject, Udo Thiel explores early modern writings spanning approximately the seventeenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century on two topics of self consciousness, the human subject’s ‘awareness or consciousness of one’s own self’, and personal identity, the human subject’s tendency to regard one’s own self as the same identical self or person that persists through time (p. 1). The aim of the book is twofold. First, to provide an account of the development of (...) self-consciousness and personal identity covering prominent French, British, and German thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their critics, their followers, and to ‘critically evaluate their contributions’ (p. 3). The second aim is to situate the contributions of these philosophers within their historical context. In this review I summarize and evaluate The Early Modern Subject. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Eino Kaila's (1890-1958) understanding of David Hume. Kaila was one of the leading Finnish philosophers of the 20th century and a correspondent of the Vienna Circle. He introduced logical empiricism into Finland and taught Georg Henrik von Wright. Final draft.

This paper aims to clarify the program of Deleuze’s work on Hume’s philosophy. Also, I plan to make clear the operational meaning of Deleuze’s own hallmark regarding his approaches to philosophy. I start to follow Deleuze’s plot by engendering three functions of his interpretation of Hume’s Treatise that will be the area of three thematic chapters. The first tries to sort the polemical function of empiricism that is launched through Deleuze’s Hume; the second attempts to figure the domain of subjectivity (...) as the inventive function of the book; the third searches the creative function by describing the role of the institutional theory. (shrink)

Explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity - two fundamendtal features of human subjectivity - as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the sevententh and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and (...) personal identity is in many ways characteristic [of] and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is also an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of dust jacket. (shrink)

Book 1, Part 4, Section 5 of Hume’s Treatise is taken up with a response to an argument for the immateriality of the soul that Hume considered “remarkable,” and that Kant was later to describes as the “Achilles” (the strongest) of all the arguments for this conclusion. This paper surveys versions of the argument offered by Cudworth, Bayle, and Clarke before going on to argue that Hume’s own treatment of the argument departs from the standard in a number of important (...) ways. The departures restate the argument in Humean terms, replacing premises concerning inherence, substance, and action, which Hume considered to be false or unintelligible, with ones mentioning conjunction at a location in space, which he considered to be at least intelligible. These changes challenge the view that Treatise 1.4.5 was intended as a satire or a lampoon. A satire or lampoon exposes a flat statement of its target view to ridicule. It does not modify that view— certainly not by way of introducing improvements to make it more intelligible. Hume meant to endorse what he said in Treatise 1.4.5. In particular, he meant to endorse the tenets that that there are mental states that are spatially extended, and that it is as difficult to explain how an immaterial soul could contain extended mental images as to explain how a material soul could contain unextended thoughts. (shrink)

This paper examines Husserl’s fascination with the issues raised by Hume’s critique of the philosophy of the ego and the continuity of consciousness. The path taken here follows a continental and phenomenological approach. Husserl’s 1905 lecture course on the temporalization of immanent time-consciousness is a phenomenological-eidetic examination of how the continuity of consciousness and the consciousness of continuity are possible. It was by way of Husserl’s reading of Hume’s discussion of “flux” or “flow” that his discourse on temporal phenomena led (...) to the classification of a point-like now as a “fiction” and opened up a horizonal approach to the present that Hume’s introspective analyses presuppose but that escaped the limitations of the language that was available to him. In order to demonstrate the radicality of Husserl’s temporal investigations and his inspiration in the work of Hume, I show how his phenomenological discourse on the living temporal flow of consciousness resolves the latter’s concern about the problem of continuity by re-thinking how, in the absence of an abiding impression of Self, experience is continuous throughout the flux of its running off impressions. (shrink)

Waxman has reversed the historical process and gone from Kant to Hume. In his previous book on Kant, Kant's Model of the Mind, it was pointed out that Hume's philosophy seemed to come to grief with the failure to account for the identity of the self, and this in turn was a consequence of Hume's inability to account for how the imagination is able to yield a consciousness of succession. There seemed no way to obtain either the unity, spatial and (...) temporal, in the objects perceived, or the unity of apperception in the perceiver. The problem of knowledge for Kant in many ways becomes simply the problem of how, from a manifold of entities spread out spatially and occurring in a temporally developing intuition, the mind is able to achieve the unity of apperception which, as Plotinus, Bayle, Leibniz, and perhaps even Hume when he recognized his failure to account for the unity of the self, all argued is essential to all thought. In trying to come to grips with this, Kant arrived at a transcendental idealism in which neither space nor time nor even sensations as ordinarily understood had any ground in the reality that transcends the only phenomenal empirical world. If Hume's failure led in Kant to a sort of empirical realism, it also led to the radical scepticism of the transcendental idealism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S BUNDLES, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND KANT Even if we are inclined to view Hume's attempt to explain ascriptions of personal identity as an abysmal failure, we might still be sympathetic toward his proposal to replace the going substance theory of the nature of mind with his bundle account. Thus we might fault Hume for erecting an unachievably high standard for personal identity, or round on him for excluding bodily criteria (...) 2... from his solution, but nonetheless applaud his spiriting away of the Cartesian soul substance leaving his "true idea of the human mind" (261) as a collection of perceptions in its stead. However, Hume's concern to give an account of the idea of the unity of a human mind in terms of related perceptions has run into notoriously rough sledding, not the least of which is the fact that Hume himself in his Appendix to "Of Personal Identity" seems to abandon his bundle theory in despair. In this paper I shall first be concerned to examine the criticism of his bundle theory which Hume brings forth in the Appendix and explain why I think the core difficulty remains insoluble for Hume. I shall then go on to suggest that the unworkability of Húmete bundle theory is directly tied to his failure to appreciate certain features of the peculiarly first person nature of his question about the make-up of minds. In thus emphasizing the place of the first person voice in my interpretation I am stealing a leaf, if not a chapter, from Kant. But this is as it should be since one of the aims of this essay is to provide an interpretation of Hume's difficulties with his account of the nature of mind which explains part of the reason why 'self-consciousness' (or 'apperception') looms so very large in the Critique of Pure Reason attack upon Hume's type of bundle theory. 60. 1. Hume's Second Thoughts In a burst of self criticism at the Appendix to the section on personal identity, Hume brings forth this objection to his own efforts:...Having thus loosen' d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings cou'd have indue' d me to receive it (635). After additional reflections Hume encapsulates his objection thus:...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (6SS-6). What is the defect Hume calls to our attention? Notice first that the footnote on page 635 explicitly refers us back to that part of his account Hume considers defective; and when we look back to the text of the Treatise in question, page 260, we find it is precisely there that Hume uses the analogy of a republic to sketch his bundle theory of the unity of mind in terms of the two associative principles, resemblance and causation. So it must somehow be that this account in terms of the associative principles is mistaken. But what then is the mistake? According to Hume it is that he cannot 'explain' the principles which unite the discrete percepts. Now it seems to me there are only two possible things Hume could mean in saying this. He could mean either (1) that the principles which connect the percepts of one mind are instances of the associative principles, but he cannot explain them; or (2) there must be other, non-associative, principles which connect the percepts of a single mind and these he cannot explain. 61. I think we can safely conclude (1) cannot represent Hume's misgivings when he says he is unable to explain the uniting principles of the mental bundles. There is first the fact that he does not call into question his general programme of accounting for the nature of the unity of complex things by the principles of causation, resemblance and contiguity — for example, ships, plants, animals, houses and rivers (e.g. 257f) — but only his... (shrink)

Conceptual problems for consciousness are analogous to a Humean’s problem with scientific laws. Just as consciousness is often seen to involve further facts beyond the physical, laws would seem to involve reality beyond the Humean’s occurrent facts1. I will attempt to show that a Lewis-style best-system solution to the problem for laws should be applied to the related problem for consciousness. The leading idea of a best-system account is that law and chance claims are true in virtue of their place (...) in ideal systematic treatment of the totality of occurrent fact. Nomic facts about law and chance, then, are not “further facts” beyond the occurrent; rather they are a matter of idealized scientific theory. (shrink)