Lilli Alanen

Personal Identity, Passions, and "The True Idea of the Human Mind"

This paper explores some strands of the new science of man proposed in Hume’s Treatise, focusing on the role given to the passions in Hume’s account of personal identity. How is the view of the self with regard to the passions examined in Book 2 supposed to complement, as Hume suggests, that with regard to thought and imagination discussed in Book 1 (T 1.4.6.19; SBN 261)? How should the nature and object of the account there proposed be understood? While it is clear that Hume rejects a metaphysical thesis of the mind as a unitary, simple thinking substance, it is less clear whether he also gives an alternative metaphysical theory of the mind as consisting in a mere succession of discrete impressions and ideas or more modestly offers a description of what we actually observe when inspecting our idea of self. I favor the latter view and argue that Hume’s best and most interesting characterization of the mind is the political analogy of the self as a republic or commonwealth that Hume calls a “true idea of the human mind.” The mind in this metaphor is compared to a dynamic political system of changing members driven by common or shared goals and interacting in determinate ways regulated by its constitution. This system of interconnected ideas already comes with all the elements that a broader, embodied and social self presupposes. It is thus because the idea of mind or self as sketched in the Section “Of Personal Identity” in Book 1 is grounded in the passions that the examination of their nature and mechanisms in Book 2 can be seen by Hume as actually “corroborating” it.

Cartesian Scientia and the Human Soul

Descartess conception of matter changed the account of physical nature in terms of extension and related quantitative terms. Plants and animals were turned into species of machines, whose natural functions can be explained mechanistically. This article reflects on the consequences of this transformation for the psychology of human soul. In so far the soul is rational it lacks extension, yet it is also united with the body and affected by it, and so it is able to act on extended matter. The article examines Descartess concept of scientia and his different uses of nature, and argues that there is much more continuity between Aristotelian and Cartesian psychology than is usually recognized when it comes to an explanation of the functions of the embodied human soul. If this makes psychology unfit for inclusion in the new science of nature, its object is still a natural phenomenon and has an important place within scientia as Descartes conceived of it.

Emotions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

While seventeenth-century accounts of passions reflected concerns raised in earlier discussions of passions both in the medical tradition and in the moral treatises of the Aristotelian or Neo-Stoic tradition, new issues emerged as the general picture of the physical universe and human nature changed. The traditional approaches still dominated university discussions, but those who endorsed the mechanistic philosophy of nature, such as Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza, searched for new ways of explaining and controlling emotions by treating them as natural phenomena obeying the same laws as the rest of nature. The question of the role of reason in governing the passions took on a new urgency within the mechanistic framework.