Paradox

266 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXThe empiricist who has such trouble establishing theexternal world might be expected to find a welcome contrastwhen searching for the self. What could be more accessibleto you than your own self! But Hume reports that, as far ashis own case is concerned, his harvest only yields more ideas.The best empirical sense Hume can make of the self isthat it is a bundle of ideas. The bundle theory has the virtueof forestalling some paradoxes about substance. If, as Aristotlebelieves, substances have priority over properties, then we canask what the world would be like if Julius Caesar had all theproperties of Mark Antony and Mark Antony had all theproperties of Julius Caesar (even to the extent of Caesar beingcalled by “Mark Antony” and vice versa). This world wouldlook exactly like ours. The indistinguishability inclines manyto deny that we have described a distinct possible world. Wehave only described our own world in different language.Leibniz solves this paradox with the principle of the identityof indiscernibles: no two substances have exactly the sameproperties. But Hume’s bundle theory solves the theory at amore radical level by saying that there are no substances ofthe sort that have priority over properties. If one picturessubstances as cushions into which one can plunge pins (properties),then it makes sense to ask what pure substances are.It also makes sense to exchange every pin from one cushionwith every pin of another cushion. But if substances are justcollections of pins, then these questions about substancecannot arise.But the bundle theory has its own paradoxes. The basicproblem is that bundles are too arbitrary to sustain intuitivedistinctions about selves. What makes one bundle of ideas meand another bundle you? Not the fact that I thought of theideas constituting my bundle. For that reintroduces a sub-