A teoria do “eu” como feixe em Hume e Parfit: identidade pessoal e considerações Morais

Abstract

This work investigates the bundle theories of the self of David Hume, Derek Parfit and their critiques of the concept of personal identity. In the Treatise of human nature, Hume highlights the problems of the concept of personal identity in the section Of Personal Identity and in his famous Appendix tells us that this is an insoluble problem. In this work, we highlight his skeptical thinking and his criticisms of John Locke, a philosopher who defended personal identity as the maintenance of the same memories. Hume's studies of causality, experience, memory insufficiency, and skepticism help us to understand his conclusion that the self is a bundle of perceptions. Interestingly, Hume also states in the Treatise on Human Nature that the identical self is the object of moral sentiments, which points to a certain mitigation of his skepticism about personal identity and a split between his critical and skeptical philosophy in relation to his philosophy. moral when analyzing the self. We also analyze in this work the theory of the self as a bundle in Parfit's philosophy, in his book Reasons and Persons, which brings some criticisms similar to those of Hume about the identity of bodies (physical criterion) and the identity coming from memory, or from the mind (psychological criteria). Furthermore, although Parfit approaches Locke in the use of thought experiments, he shows the insufficiency of memory to explain personal identity, such a critique seems similar to the Humean critique. We argue that the similarities in Parfit's and Hume's critiques occur because they both share the conclusion that personal identity is a fiction and because both also agree that the human mind is analogous to a nation that changes over time but remains the same. According to Parfit, a person could be explained as successive selves over time without presupposing personal identity to define survival and moral relations between people. These successive selves can accept fissions and fusions in special cases as in their “puzzling cases”. Despite being criticized, their “puzzling cases” imply that no criteria would solve the problems in the concept of personal identity, leading us to the conclusion that personal identity is not what matters in explaining the survival of people and for morals; which leads Parfit to replace the concept of personal identity with the relation R (connectivity and/or psychological continuity). We argue that Hume made a split between his critical and skeptical philosophy in which personal identity is an unsolvable problem and ordinary life in which the identical self is affirmed by a natural tendency and is the object of moral sentiments. In Parfit, the relation between his criticisms of personal identity and common life appear more homogeneously in his philosophy and point to a change in the way we should justify practical reasons and how we should base an ethical theory based on the observation that personal identity does not what matters.