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  • The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity by Galen Strawson
  • Abe Roth
Galen Strawson. The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 165. Cloth, $35.00.

Hume understands identity as “invariableness and uninterruptedness” through a supposed change in time, something true only of objects he calls steadfast. And Hume discerns nothing steadfast about the mind or self—nothing like a substance or soul underlying the changing and interrupted succession of perceptions we experience in ourselves. I nevertheless think of myself as the same person over time. A central concern of the Treatise discussion of personal identity is to give a psychological explanation of how we arrive at this belief in personal identity. The answer, very broadly, is that it is a fiction of the imagination produced by certain associative principles. Hume notoriously goes on to disavow this explanation in his Appendix to the Treatise. The reasons for his dissatisfaction, however, are obscure, and the several decades since Barry Stroud’s influential work have seen many competing interpretations of what Hume found troubling. Strawson joins the interpretive fray with this new book.

Strawson is well known as an advocate (along with Wright, Kail, and others) of the “New Hume” or skeptical realist reading of Hume on causation, which holds that there is a real necessary connection between cause and effect, albeit one whose nature is unknown to us. The contrast with the standard reading of Hume as a causal regularity theorist is striking. In Part 1 of the book, Strawson reviews the case for the skeptical realist position. There is no attempt at a full recounting of the debate that would convince critics like Winkler and Millican; the point is to provide background for the discussion of personal identity.

That interpretation is developed in Part 2. Hume is usually thought to hold that the mind is a mere bundle of perceptions, with no persisting substance or anything else that would genuinely connect and unify the perceptions. Strawson objects that this claim—like the assertion that there is no real connection between cause and effect—is dogmatically metaphysical. In attributing such claims to Hume, standard readings fail to appreciate his professed lack of knowledge on these matters (47). We do better to think that Hume believes or “takes it for granted” (5, 9) that there is more to the self than what is perceived, but that this something more is unknown to us. That said, Strawson’s Hume does think that the only “empirically warranted” way to conceive the mind is as a mere bundle (33, 47).

The skeptical realist reading is challenged by a verificationist reading of Hume’s semantics, which rules out entertaining thoughts about (let alone believing in) the sorts of real connections between perceptions of the mind that would be afforded by an underlying substantial self. Strawson replies that Hume distinguishes between two sorts of content: one [End Page 491] that is positive and descriptive, empirically warranted and derived from impressions (6–7); and another that would allow Hume to “suppose in a general way, when doing philosophy, that the expression ‘something-more-than-experience’ can refer, and correspondingly, that something-more-than-experience exists” (7).

But even if real connections can by Hume’s lights be possible objects of thought, that is far from thinking that Hume is committed to them or “takes [them] for granted,” as Strawson insists (5, 9). A more natural option for the skeptic like Hume would be agnosticism not only about the nature of these connections, but about their existence as well.

Part 3 focuses on the Appendix worries. According to Strawson, Hume regards the psychological principles that explain our belief in personal identity as real, entering into causal relations. He speaks of Hume’s commitment to the “real existence and operation” of principles that unite our perceptions in thought (105). But psychological principles so understood cannot be reconciled with the only empirically legitimate conception of the mind as a mere bundle of perceptions (120). The idea, fundamental to Hume’s psychology, of the mind with faculties that exercise powers and enter into causal relations (56, 58, 102) falls away on the...

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