On Hume's Problem With Personal Identity:from The Views Of Empiricism

This paper discusses David Hume's problem with personal identity.Hume expounded his basic view about personal identity in Human Nature in chapter 4 section 6:A constant entity-like personality in the conventional sense does not exist.An identical self is just a fiction of human mind.Each of us is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions that follow each other enormously quickly and are in a perpetual flux and movement.While Hume was not quite satisfied with his explanation,in the appendix of Human Nature,Hume admitted that he didn't know how to fix on the interpretation of personal identity to make it be consistent with the rest of his points,while he also sticks to the two basic empirical principles.This is Hume's problem with personal identity.While in Hume's discussion about personal identity,he transferred this topic into discussing how did ideas get connected and turns out to be a continuum.This paper discusses this problem from the perspective of idealism,mainly on how did British empiricism deal with idea.This article firstly through investigating Hume's declaration about personal identity and his later recantation,clarifies what is Hume's problem on personality identity;Secondly through investigating British empirical theory,reveals deficiencies in Hume's idealism,and then starting from the contradiction in Hume's theory,by introducing William James's thought theory and radical empiricism,discusses two ways to solve Hume's problem with personal identity.