Stimulus 1: Outline
Philosophical question: what is a human? More specifically, what constitutes the self?
● Connection to stimulus: the drawers compel the question of what is inside of them,
what is inside of us? What are we made up of, if anything?
Approaches:
● Hume: we have no self
● Kant: we have a self tied together in a unity of consciousness
Thesis: I will disagree with Hume that there is no self, and rather agree with Kant that the
self is a unity of consciousness which organizes our empirical experiences in order to help us
understand the world.
Body 1: according to Immanuel Kant, the self is created by a priori rules and principles
which renders raw data from our empirical sensations comprehensible to us so that we can
better understand and live in the world.
● Humans have a fundamental organizing rules that naturally order data into
interpretable information
● These rules are a priori: precede sensations of experience and exist independently,
came as software already installed
● Results in the sensations from immediate experience conforming to minds rather
than the reverse
● Without the self we would not be able to undertsnad the external world
● Thus there must be an immaterial part to us which is connects us to the material world
○ Self is able to synthesize and perform this unifying function because
it transcends sense experience. Your self is a subject an organizing
principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible.
, ○ Believed in a Unity of Consciousness: thoughts and perception are
bound together in a unity by being all contained in one
consciousness - our own
■ Both a posteriori knowledge (empirical) and a priori knowledge
through human’s organized innate fabric
■ Integrated in this fabric is our conscious self
● Connection to stimulus:
○ Inside the drawers is the data form our sense experience
○ The self is what organizes it into the different compartments and helps us
understand it
Body 2:
David Hume, on the other hand, upon introspection, found that the self does not exist since
there is no one single impression which constitutes it.
● Empiricist: source of all knowledge comes from direct sensory experience
● There are only two entities:
○ Impressions: basic sensations from experience, lively and vivid
○ Ideas: all ideas are copies of impressions, less lively and vivid
● The self cannot exist since there exists no immutable impression which constitutes
the self
○ We can never catch a single impression of our ‘self’
○ The self is fictitious
● The self is therefore a collection of impressions
○ “A bundle of perceptions” always transient, mind like a stage with actors
leaving and entering
● Connection to stimulus:
○ Inside the drawers are just bundles of impression that always leave
○ Nothing connecting them
Body 3: Evaluation
● Kant: Felt threatened by Hume’s conclusion
○ Threatened knowledge: disproves everything we know as it is all based
entirely on impressions. Hume disproves the reliability of impressions
○ If hume was right we would never be able to reach genuine knowledge
● Kant found a crucial flaw to Hume’s argument: we do not experience the world as a
disconnected stream of sensations, but rather as an organized world within the
framework of space and time
● Hume’s problem, according to Kant, was that he assumed that the self was an
object of consciousness and simply one of the contents of the mind, but rather,
the invisible thread that ties the contents of consciousness together, and
that’s why Hume couldn’t find it
Conclusion
Philosophical question: what is a human? More specifically, what constitutes the self?
● Connection to stimulus: the drawers compel the question of what is inside of them,
what is inside of us? What are we made up of, if anything?
Approaches:
● Hume: we have no self
● Kant: we have a self tied together in a unity of consciousness
Thesis: I will disagree with Hume that there is no self, and rather agree with Kant that the
self is a unity of consciousness which organizes our empirical experiences in order to help us
understand the world.
Body 1: according to Immanuel Kant, the self is created by a priori rules and principles
which renders raw data from our empirical sensations comprehensible to us so that we can
better understand and live in the world.
● Humans have a fundamental organizing rules that naturally order data into
interpretable information
● These rules are a priori: precede sensations of experience and exist independently,
came as software already installed
● Results in the sensations from immediate experience conforming to minds rather
than the reverse
● Without the self we would not be able to undertsnad the external world
● Thus there must be an immaterial part to us which is connects us to the material world
○ Self is able to synthesize and perform this unifying function because
it transcends sense experience. Your self is a subject an organizing
principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible.
, ○ Believed in a Unity of Consciousness: thoughts and perception are
bound together in a unity by being all contained in one
consciousness - our own
■ Both a posteriori knowledge (empirical) and a priori knowledge
through human’s organized innate fabric
■ Integrated in this fabric is our conscious self
● Connection to stimulus:
○ Inside the drawers is the data form our sense experience
○ The self is what organizes it into the different compartments and helps us
understand it
Body 2:
David Hume, on the other hand, upon introspection, found that the self does not exist since
there is no one single impression which constitutes it.
● Empiricist: source of all knowledge comes from direct sensory experience
● There are only two entities:
○ Impressions: basic sensations from experience, lively and vivid
○ Ideas: all ideas are copies of impressions, less lively and vivid
● The self cannot exist since there exists no immutable impression which constitutes
the self
○ We can never catch a single impression of our ‘self’
○ The self is fictitious
● The self is therefore a collection of impressions
○ “A bundle of perceptions” always transient, mind like a stage with actors
leaving and entering
● Connection to stimulus:
○ Inside the drawers are just bundles of impression that always leave
○ Nothing connecting them
Body 3: Evaluation
● Kant: Felt threatened by Hume’s conclusion
○ Threatened knowledge: disproves everything we know as it is all based
entirely on impressions. Hume disproves the reliability of impressions
○ If hume was right we would never be able to reach genuine knowledge
● Kant found a crucial flaw to Hume’s argument: we do not experience the world as a
disconnected stream of sensations, but rather as an organized world within the
framework of space and time
● Hume’s problem, according to Kant, was that he assumed that the self was an
object of consciousness and simply one of the contents of the mind, but rather,
the invisible thread that ties the contents of consciousness together, and
that’s why Hume couldn’t find it
Conclusion
