Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 47

Philosophy - Essay Example In his epistemology, David Hume held that all ideas are derived from sense experience; Hume saw ideas as nothing but memory of impressions (Solomon, Higgins, and Martin, 2011). For Hume, impressions are the immediate sensations that we have of things. For Hume, therefore, it is impossible of have ideas of things that we do not sense or we do not have their impressions. In his views on the self, David Hume argued that there is nothing like, simply because we do not have and we cannot have impressions of the self. The following is the argument that Hume advanced in support of his view that self is an illusion, and that what we call self is merely a bundle of sensations. Hume began his argument on the self by claiming that, if you think about the concept self, and if you will ask yourself which of the five senses give you the impression of self, you will realize that none of the five human senses gives one the impression of self as a unified reality. Hume claimed that when he tries to think about the concept of self, what he stumbles upon are particular perceptions such as heat or cold, love or hate, or pleasure or pain. Hume claimed that in his reflections on self, he realized that it was impossible for him to have a unified impression of self without the particular perceptions. For this reason, therefore, Hume concluded that there is no self, but what we call self is merely a bundle of sensations. Hume, however, argued that, although self is a bundle of sensations, we nevertheless have some idea of personal identity or the self. Hume reasoned that the idea of personal identify or the self that we have is an error in reasoning caused by human tendency to associate ideas and to attribute to erroneously attribute to them a causal connection. Because of this human tendency, we associate the various human perceptions and wrongly claim that these perceptions cause the impression of self. Hume, therefore, concluded that the impression of self is impossible, and for that