Hume's Difficulty - Time and Identity in the Treatise (Paperback)

In this volume--the first, focused study of Hume on time and identity--Baxter focuses on Hume s treatment of the concept of numerical identity, which is central to Hume's famous discussions of the external world and personal identity. Hume raises a long unappreciated, and still unresolved, difficulty with the concept of identity: how to represent something as "a medium betwixt unity and number." Superficial resemblance to Frege s famous puzzle has kept the difficulty in the shadows. Hume s way of addressing it makes sense only in the context of his unorthodox theory of time. Baxter shows the defensibility of that theory against past dismissive interpretations, especially of Hume s stance on infinite divisibility. Later the author shows how the difficulty underlies Hume s later worries about his theory of personal identity, in a new reading motivated by Hume s important appeals to consciousness. Baxter casts Hume throughout as an acute metaphysician, and reconciles this side of Hume with his overarching Pyrrhonian skepticism.

"