thesis

tion. Each of these objections has met with responses by Swinburne (1996b, 1996c, 1998). But
I fail to see how it even gets off the ground – one simply cannot make an inference from
logical possibility allowed by a particular description to a natural possibility supposedly
upheld by a particular entity fitting that description. Reames (1999) makes a similar point,
claiming that Swinburne’s notion of logical possibility is better described as an instance of
natural or metaphysical possibility and so is not amenable to a priori arguments from con-
ceivability.
An even more fundamental way to counter the argument is to deny that persons are
substances in the first place. Hume raises the point elegantly (1739, 1.4.6):
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular per-
ception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch
myself at any time with a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.
But Swinburne rejects this on the following grounds (157–8):
One wonders what he supposes that the common subject would look like, and what he consid-
ered would count as its discovery… The self which he ought to have found in all his mental
events is supposed to be the subject, not the object of perception. And finding it consists in
being aware of different mental events as had by the same subject. Further… that certain si-
multaneous mental events are states of a common subject… It is among the data of your expe-
rience that these are all your mental events.
However, Hume’s point is precisely that this is not the case. He is not aware of “different
mental events as had by the same subject” – he is aware only of a succession of mental
events. James puts the point as follows (1892, 82–3):
The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as “I” can remem-
ber those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain
ones among them… The I which knows them… need [not]… be an unchanging metaphysical
entity like the Soul or a principle like the transcendental Ego… It is a thought, at each moment
different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together will all that the
latter called its own… The thoughts themselves are the thinkers.
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