Personal identity and sympathy in Humes Treatise

Author(s)

Dario de Queiroz Galvão Neto

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2018-02-16

Examining board members

Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta; Fernão de Oliveira Salles dos Santos Cruz; Celí Hirata; Maria Isabel de Magalhães Papaterra Limongi

• Advisor: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta

Abstract

This work explores the theme of personal identity in Humes Treatise of human nature (1739-1740), according to these three points of view: sympathy, imagination and passions. First of all, through the study of the relation between the self and the ideia of other in the principle of sympathy, we intend to show that this principle carries within itself a meaning more significant than a mere communication of passions or affects usually adopted by the commentators. In effect, if we examine the dependency between the individual and his similar, we find in the mechanism of sympathy a conflict regarding the nature of personal identity: the self is, at the same time, the liveliest perception we can have in the thought, and, without the exteriority, according to Humes words, the self is in reality nothing. In order to overcome the conflict, we propose: first, the investigation of the imagination, through which a fiction of the self is created in the thought; second, the succession of passions, where a self of pleasure and pain is produced. Without the intention of favouring the imagination or the passions as the principle of the formation of identity, neither with the intention of speculating about an exhaustive articulation between these two, we intend to consider by the three points of view (including that of sympathy) what would be the essential about personal identity: an order that is established by the disorder, and that is at all times threatened by that very disorder. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/14361-0 - Reason and sentiment at the origin of moral judgments in David Hume
• Grantee: Dario de Queiroz Galvão Neto
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master