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

Abstract

Jonathan Ellis

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 little consensus on the source of his worry.  Novel interpretations of Hume’s dissatisfaction continue to surface, especially in recent years.  The text of the Appendix is notoriously ambiguous and, at first glance, lends itself to many readings.  However, there are substantial clues in the text of the Treatise to which sufficient attention has still not been paid. 

In the first part of my paper, I introduce and discuss some intricate aspects of the text (mostly of App. 20) and explore how they bear upon many of the interpretations in currency.  The lessons I draw from this discussion help me subsequently support my own interpretation of Hume’s Appendix.  In the second part of the paper, I argue that Hume’s problem concerns the relation, in his genetic explanation of ideas like that of the self, between the objects of the perceptions along which there is a smooth and uninterrupted progress of thought, on the one hand, and the contents of the ideas that the mind in such cases sometimes subsequently invents, on the other.  Of the going interpretations, I claim that mine is the only one that has Hume worried about something that would truly have worried him and at the same time honors the details of the text.