Hume: Consciousness

Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength has been (...) largely overlooked in favor of mental states’ type, representational contents, domain-specific phenomenology, or processes such as attention. Considering mental strength in our reflections about the mind illuminates debates about the relation of representational contents and phenomenal character, and it also helps address questions about the structure and functions of consciousness. Mental strength provides a unifying construct to model what is shared in the phenomenology of different types of conscious experiences. (shrink)

I argue that the Hume of the Treatise maintains an account of knowledge according to which (i) every instance of knowledge must be an immediately present perception (i.e., an impression or an idea); (ii) an object of this perception must be a token of a knowable relation; (iii) this token knowable relation must have parts of the instance of knowledge as relata (i.e., the same perception that has it as an object); and any perception that satisfies (i)-(iii) is an instance (...) of knowledge. I then apply this account to the case of sense perception. I argue that Hume holds that relations of impressions can be intuited, are knowable, and are necessary. For Hume, these relations constitute sensory knowledge. While Hume is rightly labeled an empiricist for many reasons, a close inspection of his account of knowledge reveals yet another way in which he deserves the label. (shrink)

Self-consciousness can be understood as the ability to think I-thou-ghts which can be described as thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’. Self-consciousness possesses two specific correlated features: the first regards the fact that it is grounded on a first-person perspective, whereas the second concerns the fact that it should be considered a consciousness of the self as subject rather than a consciousness of the self as object. The aim of this paper is to analyse a few considerations about Descartes and Hume’s (...) approaches to self-consciousness, as both philosophers introduce a first-personal method of accessing the subjective dimension through an introspective account. Descartes’s view on self-consciousness seems incapable of conceiving and recognizing herself as herself, while Hume’s seems to lack those features assigned to the consciousness of self-as-subject. (shrink)

This article investigates Hume's account of mental transparency. In this article, I will endorse Qualitative Transparency – that is, the thesis that we cannot fail to apprehend the qualitative characters of our current perceptions, and these apprehensions cannot fail to be veridical – on the basis that, unlike its competitors, it is both weak enough to accommodate the introspective mistakes that Hume recognises, and yet strong enough to make sense of his positive employments of mental transparency. Moreover, Qualitative Transparency is (...) also philosophically satisfying in providing good philosophical reason for why the mental states that are incorrigible should in fact be so. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century philosophy. Locke introduces the concept of persons as subjects of consciousness who also simultaneously recognize themselves as such subjects. Hume, however, argues that minds are nothing but bundles of perceptions, lacking intrinsic unity at a time or across time. Yet Hume thinks our emotional responses to one another mean that persons in everyday life are defined by their virtues, vices, bodily qualities, property, riches, and the like. Rousseau also (...) takes persons to be fundamentally determined by our socially-mediated emotional responses to one another, though unlike Hume or Locke, he has little interest in placing this account of persons alongside a larger discussion of the human mind and its operations. Developing this idea further, Kant argues that our moral commitments require that we must take ourselves to be free. The fundamental equality that Rousseau sought in the political order is, for Kant, a requirement that reason puts on all of us. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Eino Kaila's (1890-1958) understanding of David Hume. Kaila was one of the leading Finnish philosophers of the 20th century and a correspondent of the Vienna Circle. He introduced logical empiricism into Finland and taught Georg Henrik von Wright. Final draft.

This paper aims to clarify the program of Deleuze’s work on Hume’s philosophy. Also, I plan to make clear the operational meaning of Deleuze’s own hallmark regarding his approaches to philosophy. I start to follow Deleuze’s plot by engendering three functions of his interpretation of Hume’s Treatise that will be the area of three thematic chapters. The first tries to sort the polemical function of empiricism that is launched through Deleuze’s Hume; the second attempts to figure the domain of subjectivity (...) as the inventive function of the book; the third searches the creative function by describing the role of the institutional theory. (shrink)

This is a brief overview of the main topics and conclusions of my book, _Consciousness, Time, and Scepticism in Hume's Thought_ (Routledge, 2024).