DAVID HUME

SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHER

“THERE IS NO SELF”
• According to Hume, if people carefully examine their sense
experience through the process of introspection, they will discover
that “there is no self”
• Also, according to Hume, what people experience is just a bundle of
or collection of different perception.

• If people according to Hume started to examine the content of their

experience, they will found out that there are only distinct entities:
impressions and ideas
Distinct Entities
• Impression Cold
The basic sensations of people Heat
experience such
as;
Hate -also vivid perceptions and are
Love strong
Joy And lively
Grief
Pain
Distinct Entities
• Ideas
is a thought and images from impressions, making them less lively and vivid.
Hume further posits that different sensations are in constant
continuum that is invariable and not constant.

Also Hume argues that it cannot be any from the any of the impressions
that the idea of self is derived and consequently…
There is no self.
• Hume skeptical claim on this issue is that, people has no experience
of a simple and individual impression that they call the self, where the
self, is the totality of a person’s conscious life.

• Therefore, the idea of personal identity is a result of Imagination.

Immanuel Kant
German Philosopher

“We Construct the Self”

• According to Kant, it is the self that makes experiencing an intelligible
world possible.

• He also added that, the self is the one actively organizing and
synthesizing all of our thoughts and perceptions.
• The self, in the form consciousness, has transcendental deduction of
categories which utilizes conceptual categories…

• To construct an orderly and objective world that is stable and can be

investigated scientifically.

• Kant also believes that self is an organizing principle that makes a

unified and intelligible experience possible.
• The self, metaphorically above or behind sense experience, it uses the
categories of our mind to filter, order, relate, organize, and synthesize
sensations into a unified whole.

• In other world, the construct its own reality, actively creating a world
that is familiar, predictable and most significantly, mine.

• the self is also the product of reason, a regulative principle, because

the self regulates experience by making unified experiences possible.
• The self transcends experience because the mind can grasp aspects
of reality which are not limited to the senses.

• By using Rationality, people are able to understand certain abstract

ideas that have no corresponding physical object or sensory
experience.