ABSTRACT
It should have been obvious that Chisholm's anti-Humean account of self-awareness and self-knowledge (the awareness of one's self and one's mental states) is incompatible with Hume's basic empiricist principles. In fact, it must have been apparent that his view of these matters was Cartesian in two fundamental respects. First, like Descartes in elaborating his cogito, Chisholm claimed that a conscious thing can be known to be the subject of certain thoughts and feelings even though that thing is known only as an x that thinks, wills, and feels - not as a rational animal, a nonextended spirit, or any other specific sort of thing. As I noted, an empiricist (one rejecting Hume's principle concerning the origin of proper ideas) might well concede that the ideas of thinking, willing, and feeling are the ideas of a subject's activities or attributes and that "Thinking requires a thinker" is an analytic truth specifying a mere relation of ideas. Yet if no thinker, no self, is apparent, the ideas of thinking, willing, and feeling would have a questionable
application for that empiricist, and some other ideas - some ideas not analytically joined to the idea of a conscious subject - would no doubt be applicable in their place. A purely a priori, analytic truth could provide no basis, he would insist, for a conclusion affirming the existence of a mysterious (because undetectable) subject of mental "acts" and "states."
