Mohasina Khatun
Volume-XII, Issue-II, January 2024
Volume-XII, Issue-II, January 2024 | ||
Published Online: 31.01.2024 | Page No: 233-241 | |||
Self and
personal-identity: A Philosophical analysis after Hume and Kant
Mohasina Khatun, Research Scholar,
Department of Philosophy, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India | |
The study of self and personal identity has been a fundamental subject of philosophical inquiry, and two prominent philosophers, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, have presented contrasting perspectives on this complex topic. Hume’s no-self theory challenges the existence of a fixed, enduring self, suggesting that the self is merely a bundle of perceptions and experiences woven together by associative habits. Hume treated the self as illusion. On the other hand, Kant’s transcendental self-theory posits that the self is a necessary condition for experiencing the world and serves as the unifying center of consciousness. Kant’s theory posits the self as an a priori condition for experiencing the world. It seems that both of these theories are opposite or contradictory to each other. On the other hand it is also noticeable the Humean no-self theory and Kantian transcendental self-theory denied the traditional notion of self-i.e. self is a simple substance. So we will have seen that these two theories opposite as well as similar to each other in some aspects. This paper will elaborate on whether both of these theories are self-consistent in terms of their opposite characteristics or they can stand in parallel for similarities. | |
Keywords: Personal identity, No-self, Transcendental unity, substance, consciousness. | |