The Analysis of Personal Identity in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature

This bachelor's thesis puts forward an interpretation of David Hume's analysis of personal identity in his Treatise of Human Nature, as well as an interpretation of his subsequent doubts expressed in the Appendix. In the first part of the thesis an interpretation of Hume's theory of mind as a "bundle of perceptions", as well as an interpretation of his explanation of our propension to regard this bundle as a synchronically and diachronically identical entity is presented, after an introduction describing the philosophical discourse around personal identity, Hume's conception of philosophy and his revisionist ontology. In the second part an interpretation of the passage from the Appendix is presented, in which Hume expresses dissatisfaction with his account of personal identity. In this thesis I hold the view that the main source of Hume's dissatisfaction is the fact that the idea of the mind as a collection of all present perceptions interconnected through causal relations, which Hume held for a true idea and which serves as an implied foundation of the whole first book of the Treatise, turned out to be fictitious, just as all the other metaphysical ideas. His explanation of our propension to regard the collection of perceptions as a synchronically and diachronically identical entity, which is..