1. The Hume of the Treatise?
Associationist and Destructive Sceptic?
The well-known Hume of many textbooks is obsessive about ideas, impressions, and associationist psychology.
Major “topics” are the origin of ideas, causation, the external world, and personal identity.
Induction is reduced to association of ideas and thus shown to be irrational.
Account of the ideas of external objects and personal identity seems to indicate that both are completely incoherent.

2. A Constructive Purpose
But there are plenty of indications that Hume’s aims are not primarily destructive:
The subtitle of the Treatise declares it to be “an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (i.e. human science).
Book 2 builds a systematic account of the passions, using associationist psychology.
Book 3 develops a systematic account of morality and its foundation in human nature.
All of this evinces a firm commitment to inductive science, as do his Essays and other works!

3. Humean Epistemology i) All ideas are copies of [sensory] impressions
SO: any notion which cannot be traced to the impression from which it is derived is
“sophistry and illusion”
ii) Only 2 forms of reasoning:
matters of fact relations of ideas

4. Faculties in the Treatise
The (external) Senses Present impressions to the mind (thus creating ideas which copy them).
Reflection An internal sense, by which we inwardly sense our own mental state.
Memory Replays ideas vivaciously, reflecting their original order.

5. Faculties in the Treatise (2)
Imagination (or the Fancy) Replays ideas less vivaciously, with freedom to transpose and mix them.
Reason (or the Understanding) The overall cognitive faculty: discovers and judges truth and falsehood.
Will The conative faculty: forms intentions in response to desires and passions.

6. Sensation and Reflection
“Impressions [are of] two kinds, those of sensation, and those of reflection.” (T )
Some impressions come directly from sensation (e.g. colours, smells, pains).
Other impressions arise only from things that we think or reflect about (e.g. thinking about pain can make us feel fear; thinking about someone else’s good luck can make us envious). These are impressions of reflection, which at T Hume says are either passions (e.g. the desire for something) or emotions (e.g. happiness).

7. Three Principles of Association
Ideas may be associated in three ways:
“The qualities, from which this association arises … are three, viz. RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT.” (T )
Association is “a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world” has remarkable effects like gravity in the physical world (T ).
The complex ideas that arise from such association “may be divided into RELATIONS, MODES, and SUBSTANCES” (T ).

8. The argument against the idea of the self
By “self” we mean a single thing which is the subject of all our experiences and which continues the same over time
If we do have such an idea (thought or concept), then it must be possible to show the impression (experience or perception) upon which this idea is based
We have no experience which could give rise to such an idea [why not?]
Therefore, we have no such idea (i.e. the term is meaningless, in the sense that there is nothing to which it refers)

9. We have no experience of the “self”
“I may venture to affirm of…mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
Therefore "all disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union"

10. SELF: the very “idea”
Three essential properties [by relations of ideas] (371):
i) it is continuous through time
ii) it is perfectly [numerically, strictly] identical from one time to the next
iii) it is perfectly simple [no parts: cannot lose part of self, ½ self makes no sense, etc.]

11. HUME’S ARGUMENT (371)
There is [as matter of fact] no impression from which the idea of the SELF can be copied, since no idea is
i) continuous
ii) unchanging, and
iii) simple
SO: there is no such idea.

12. Summary
there are severe limits to what we can conclude on the basis of observational or introspective evidence -- ‘self,’ for instance, isn’t clearly implied by what we observe externally or introspect internally
it may be that there isn’t any ‘sameness of person over time’ -- that the “I” is a grammatical artifact the way “it” is in “It is raining”

13. Alasdair Macintyre
Stories define who we are. Our sense of identity is forged by the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we come to believe and those we choose to dismiss (childhood stories create moral identity)
Stories build and preserve a group's sense of community. Stories align and motivate by portraying the world in vivid terms that build emotional connections among constituents, giving them a sense of shared purpose (historical stories create national identity)

14. To be the subject of a narrative is:
To be accountable for the actions and experiences which compose a narratable life.
In other words, I can tell a story that makes the connection between who I am now and who I was in the past; I can describe how I became the person I am today
Others are accountable for a narrative that includes me.
Any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives

15. “Of what story do I find myself a part?”
The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.
“The only criteria of success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest.”
Do you see unity in the story of your life?

16. Narrative Identity
Personhood as "a character abstracted from a history."
Humans are essentially story-telling animals.
Our self-concept has no meaning without a story

17. Personal Narrative Personal narratives place one in a context
Context set by traditions and history of one’s society and family
Therefore one’s personal identity is constrained by one’s social place.

18. We have to have both some kind of psychological continuity -- a single being that has recorded a series of events -- and a meaningful way of putting them together, a narrative, to have a continuous, identical self.