Hume's Continuants

Annemarie Butler (Iowa State University)

In Treatise1.4.6, Hume offers an explanation of belief in personal identity. But in the Appendix, he confesses that his account is "very defective." On my interpretation, our beliefs about continuants combine ideas together in ways that is not simply given in experience. We do so by imagining that a unity co-exists with successions. I explain that Hume's Appendix problem is limited to belief in one's own identity, and does not extend to belief in identity of other people or things. My interpretation distinguishes between continuants-in-thoughts and successions-of-impressions. I use this result to speculate about Hume's account of continuants more generally, and the continuity of space and time themselves. I contrast Hume's account with Locke's account of extension and duration and our ideas thereof. I take my result to confirm Lorne Falkenstein's claim that there are some complex ideas whose content is not exhausted by its corresponding simple impressions. (Falkenstein's examples are the ideas of space and time.) I contend that Hume has resources to explain how we come to believe in something approaching Locke's continuous space and time (as an obscure idea of so much greater).