Hume and Reid on personal identity

Problems of personal identity have intrigued psychologists and philosophers for many years. Certain philosophers, for example, Samuel Clarke, propounded a substance view of the self, i.e., the self is some kind of immaterial substance which underlies all of a person's actions and thoughts, and one is immediately aware of this self. Thomas Reid is an example of this view, as we will see in the following.

Other philosophers, on the other hand, take a nonsubstantial view of the self. One of these was David Hume. For Hume the self is not an immaterial substance; in fact, it is not a substance at all. Rather, it is a bundle of perceptions which are connected together by certain relations.

The purpose of this dissertation is to compare and contrast the views of Hume and Reid on the topic of personal identity. First we will examine Hume's view of identity in general, and we will suggest that if Hume had had an intentional object theory of perception, his view would have made more sense. In the second and third chapters, we will focus on Hume's theory of personal identity. We conclude that his theory needs a concept of a psychophysical "substance" in order to explain the notion of self-awareness; even so. However, his theory is unable to deal with the term 'I' as an essential indexical, which it seems to be in our language. In chapter four we examine Reid's theory of personal identity. His view is that the self is a monad of which everyone is always immediately and perfectly aware, although Reid cannot explain sufficiently why the self is unique in this regard. The lack of any empirical evidence for such a self is, of course, a major problem. In chapter five, Reid interacts with Hume, and we find out that Reid, even though he may have somewhat successfully attacked Hume's ideal theory and, thereby Hume's epistemology, he does not refute Hume's theory of personal identity. In fact, he does not even deal with certain critical points in Hume's theory.