The Contents of Hume’s Appendix and the Source of His Despair*

This paper has two goals: first, to show that the footnote and structure of App. 20, to which too little careful attention has been given, ultimately undermine a great many interpretations of Hume’s dissatisfaction with his theory of personal identity; and second, to offer an interpretation that both heeds these textual features and (unlike other interpretations consistent with these features) renders Hume worried about something that would have truly bothered him. Hume’s problem, I contend, concerns the relation, in his genetic explanation of ideas such as that of the self, between (i) the objects of the perceptions along which there is a smooth and uninterrupted progress of thought, and (ii) the contents of the ideas that the mind in such cases sometimes subsequently invents. More than two and a half centuries after Hume published the Appendix to the Treatise, in which he expresses a deep discontent with his account of personal identity, there is anything but consensus on the source of his worry. Novel interpretations of Hume’s dissatisfaction continue to surface, especially in recent years. What is it that Hume finds so troubling? The basic principles that seemed to him to work so well to explain both our idea of causality and that of continued and distinct existence Hume now finds unsuccessful when applied to the idea of personal identity. Has Hume noticed some underlying circularity in his theory of ideas? Or has he a more * There are some minor variations between this draft and the final version, published in Hume Studies 32 (2) 2006.