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The No-self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity

The problem of personal identity is often said to be one of accounting for what it is that gives persons their identity over time. However, once the problem has been construed in these terms, it is plain that too much has already been assumed. For what has been assumed is just that persons do have an identity. One of the first Western thinkers to argue for the non-existence of the self was David Hume, the 18th century empiricist philosopher who argued that the self was a fiction. A new interpretation of Hume's no-self theory is put forward by arguing for an eliminative rather than a reductive point of view of personal identity, and by approaching the problem in terms of phenomenology, Buddhist critiques of the notion of the self, and the idea of a constructed self-image. It is concluded that there is no such thing as the self.