David Hume

David Hume is presented as one pole in a philosophical dispute over whether the subject is a stable, self-identical substance or a succession of impressions. His account matters here chiefly as a challenge that helps define the Kantian alternative: a subject with formal unity but no substantial positive being.

Intellectual Role

In the discussion of the epistemological antinomy between empiricism and rationalism, Hume represents a position that cannot simply be reconciled with its opposing pole. The book’s account of Kant’s transcendental turn emphasizes that Kant does not choose one side or claim to synthesize both into a higher, complete truth. Instead, he changes the terms of the dispute by treating the gap between the poles as irreducible.

Hume and the Subject

Hume’s account of the self is contrasted with the Cartesian cogito understood as a self-identical thinking substance, or res cogitans. Against that substantial conception, Hume dissolves the subject into a multitude of fleeting impressions. The contrast marks two opposing ways of describing the self: as a positive entity that remains identical with itself, or as a succession without such a substantial core.

Kant’s Alternative

Kant’s transcendental subject is presented as an answer to both positions, not as a compromise between them. It has a self-reflective unity that cannot be reduced to the empirical multitude of impressions, yet it has no substantial positive being and is not a res cogitans. The resulting subject is a purely formal function: no phenomenal intuition corresponds to it. Hume’s role in the argument is therefore structural rather than biographical; his account helps expose the limits of both a substantial ego and a self reduced to passing impressions.