Time and Personal Identity

Kant's main counter to Hume in the Critique of Pure Reason--that Causality is not merely a 'constant conjunction', but a pair that is ordered--is implicitly prepared for by his concept of Time. For, what Hume renders as a 'bundle of perceptions', Kant casts as a 'succession', thereby exposing the flimsiness of the notion 'bundle', which expresses only a vacillation between some bare unification of those perceptions, and none at all. However, the Kantian notion of Successiveness nevertheless inherits Hume's thesis that its moments are mutually independent. Thus, the critique of Successiveness that has been presented here also bears on Hume's theory of Selfhood--it agrees with Hume that there is no 'I' which is the same at different moments, without accepting his further inference that any two I's are independent. For, on the cumulative theory of Time, an I at a later stage is different from one at an earlier one, but it is not independent of what is a part of it.