Hume: Metaphysics

Self-consciousness can be understood as the ability to think I-thou-ghts which can be described as thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’. Self-consciousness possesses two specific correlated features: the first regards the fact that it is grounded on a first-person perspective, whereas the second concerns the fact that it should be considered a consciousness of the self as subject rather than a consciousness of the self as object. The aim of this paper is to analyse a few considerations about Descartes and Hume’s (...) approaches to self-consciousness, as both philosophers introduce a first-personal method of accessing the subjective dimension through an introspective account. Descartes’s view on self-consciousness seems incapable of conceiving and recognizing herself as herself, while Hume’s seems to lack those features assigned to the consciousness of self-as-subject. (shrink)

This thesis investigates Hume’s philosophy of external existence in relation to, and within the context of, his philosophy of scepticism. In his two main works on metaphysics – A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and the first Enquiry (first ed. 1748) – Hume encounters a predicament pertaining to the unreflective, ‘vulgar’ attribution of external existence to mental perceptions and the ‘philosophical’ distinction between perceptions and objects. I argue that we should understand this predicament as follows: the vulgar opinion is our (...) natural and default belief for Hume, but causal reasoning reveals it to be false, and the philosophical alternative is a confabulation that we cannot permanently believe and is devoid of justification. Hume uses the fact that we cannot have a satisfactory account of belief in external existence as a sceptical consideration to motivate his wider philosophical scepticism. Hume’s response to his predicament about external existence is found in the context of his confrontation with other sceptical worries (Treatise 1.4.7 and Enquiry 12), in which Hume also reflects generally on the nature and implications of scepticism. I argue that we should characterise Hume’s position as residually sceptical. This means that, while Hume accepts the unanswerability of some sceptical problems, he denies that it is possible to eradicate all belief as a result (and denies that it is practically useful to even try) and instead uses sceptical problems as a motivation to adopt a moderately sceptical position. While we inevitably return to entertaining the vulgar belief, there is no solution to the sceptical predicament; Hume does not endorse the vulgar belief, or the philosophical system, or indeed any alternative system of the external world that might extinguish the predicament. Sceptical doubt, for Hume, does not derail intellectual pursuits, but rather modifies our attitudes in those very pursuits. (shrink)

B.A. Thesis --University of Illinois, 1895.

Este trabalho é uma investigação sobre os conceitos de espaço presentes tanto no livro IV da Física de Aristóteles, bem como no Livro 1, parte 2, do Tratado da Natureza Humana de David Hume. Nosso ponto de partida são os paradoxos de Zenão. Sabemos que Aristóteles debate diretamente com Zenão no livro IV da Física, enquanto Hume, no Tratado da Natureza Humana discute com a posição de Zenão acerca do espaço renovada por Bayle. Tendo isto em vista, o principal objetivo (...) deste trabalho é o de expor como Aristóteles enfrenta o paradoxo proposto por Zenão acerca do lugar, e como Hume enfrentou o paradoxo proposto por Bayle sobre a constituição do espaço, através de uma apropriação do método de Zenão. (shrink)

Acceptance of Humean Supervenience and the reductive Humean analyses that entail it leads to a litany of inadequately explained conflicts with our intuitions regarding laws and possibilities. However, the non-reductive Humeanism developed here, on which law claims are understood as normative rather than fact stating, can accommodate those intuitions. Rational constraints on such norms provide a set of consistency relations that ground a semantics formulated in terms of factual-normative worlds, solving the Frege-Geach problem of construing unasserted contexts. This set of (...) factual-normative worlds includes exactly the intuitive sets of nomologically possible worlds associated with each possible set of laws. The extension of the semantics to counterfactual and subjunctive conditionals is sketched. Potential objections involving subjectivity, mind-dependence, and non-factuality are discussed. (shrink)

It has been argued that Hume’s denial of infinite divisibility entails the falsity of most of the familiar theorems of Euclidean geometry, including the Pythagorean theorem and the bisection theorem. I argue that Hume’s thesis that there are indivisibles is not incompatible with the Pythagorean theorem and other central theorems of Euclidean geometry, but only with those theorems that deal with matters of minuteness. The key to understanding Hume’s view of geometry is the distinction he draws between a precise and (...) an imprecise standard of equality in extension. Hume’s project is different from the attempt made by Berkeley in some of his later writings to save Euclidean geometry. Unlike Berkeley, who interprets the theorems of Euclidean geometry as false albeit useful approximations of geometrical facts, Hume is able to save most of the central theorems as true. (shrink)

David Hume has traditionally been assumed to be a soft determinist or compatibilist,1 at least in the 'reconciling project' that he presents in Section 8 of the first Enquiry, entitled 'Of liberty and necessity.'2 Indeed, in encyclopedias and textbooks of Philosophy he is standardly taken to be one of the paradigm compatibilists, rivalled in significance only by Hobbes within the tradition passed down through Locke, Mill, Schlick and Ayer to recent writers such as Dennett and Frankfurt.3 Many Hume scholars also (...) concur in viewing him as a determinist, for example (in date order) Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, A. J. Ayer, Paul Russell, Don Garrett, Terence Penelhum, George Botterill, John Bricke, and John Wright.4 .. (shrink)

This book addresses one of the fundamental topics in philosophy: the relation between appearance and reality. John Yolton draws on a rich combination of historical and contemporary material, ranging from the early modern period to present-day debates, to examine this central philosophical preoccupation, which he presents in terms of distinctions between phenomena and causes, causes and meaning, and persons and man. He explores in detail how Locke, Berkeley and Hume talk of appearances and their relation to reality, and offers illuminating (...) connections and comparisons with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Paul Churchland and John McDowell. He concludes by offering his own proposal for a 'realism of appearances', which incorporates elements of both Humean and Kantian thinking. His important study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, and contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Hume is traditionally credited with inventing the ‘regularity theory’ of causation, according to which the causal relation between two events consists merely in the fact that events of the first kind are always followed by events of the second kind. Hume is also traditionally credited with two other, hugely influential positions: the view that the world appears to us as a world of unconnected events, and inductive scepticism: the view that the ‘problem of induction’, the problem of providing a justification (...) for inference from observed to unobserved regularities, is insoluble. Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects. (shrink)

In this volume--the first, focused study of Hume on time and identity--Baxter focuses on Hume’s treatment of the concept of numerical identity, which is central to Hume's famous discussions of the external world and personal identity. Hume raises a long unappreciated, and still unresolved, difficulty with the concept of identity: how to represent something as "a medium betwixt unity and number." Superficial resemblance to Frege’s famous puzzle has kept the difficulty in the shadows. Hume’s way of addressing it makes sense (...) only in the context of his unorthodox theory of time. Baxter shows the defensibility of that theory against past dismissive interpretations, especially of Hume’s stance on infinite divisibility. Later the author shows how the difficulty underlies Hume’s later worries about his theory of personal identity, in a new reading motivated by Hume’s important appeals to consciousness. Baxter casts Hume throughout as an acute metaphysician, and reconciles this side of Hume with his overarching Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

In the 'Appendix' to the Treatise of Human Nature David Hume asserts that he has been unable to explain the principles which can adequately account for the unity and the identity of the self. There exists in Book I of the Treatise, a principle, which can in fact account for the unity and identity of the self. Hume utilizes the principle in his explication of our belief in the continued and independent existence of a material world. He did not, however, (...) utilize the principle in his explanation of the unity and identity of the self. In the Introduction I indicate what the principle asserts and precisely how Hume utilizes it. In chapter one I examine Hume's concept of identity with a view towards clarifying some puzzles which arise in his account. Also in this chapter I point out how his explanation of the manner in which identity is predicated of a multiplicity can be improved. Both the Introduction and chapter one prepare the way for a clear statement of the manner in which identity is predicated of the self in chapter two. I show furthermore, how an impression of the self is possible upon the principles of Book I. All references to the Treatise are to the L.A. Selby-Bigge edition, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955. (shrink)

Hume had two principal arguments for denying that we can have an idea of a vacuum, an argument from the non-entity of unqualified points and an argument from the impossibility of forming abstract ideas of manners of disposition. He also made two serious concessions to the opposed view that we can indeed form ideas of vacua, namely, that bodies that have nothing sensible disposed between them may permit the interposition of other bodies without any apparent motion or occlusion and that (...) it is possible to conceive the contents of a room to be evacuated without being compelled to conceive the walls moving into contact. To reconcile these concessions with his arguments and show why we only “falsely imagine” that we can form the idea of a vacuum, Hume developed a psychological theory of the perception of “invisible and intangible distance” that has something in common with Berkeley’s account of the perception of outward distance. This paper argues that this theory is both untenable and inconsistent with fundamental Humean principles. It explains why Hume should have rejected the two arguments against the idea of a vacuum and why accepting ideas of vacua would have been more in line with the rest of his thought than attempting to deny that we have any such ideas. (shrink)

Despite the widely recognized importance of Hume's theory of causation, there is no agreement amongst commentators about the upshot of that theory. Causal realists interpret Hume as believing that causal statements are true or false due to the existence in the universe of a power linking causes to effects, while causal anti-realists read him as denying that the existence of powers makes causal statements true or false, and as holding instead either that causal statements can be reduced to statements about (...) regularities in nature or that causal statements express feelings and cannot be genuine propositions, susceptible of truth or falsity. There appears to be considerable textual evidence for, and also against, each interpretation. The explanation for this contradictory appearance, I argue, is that Hume maintains a position that is intermediate between realism and anti-realism. On my interpretation, Hume indeed traces the impression of power between causes and effects to a feeling in the mind and denies that our causal discourse implicates the existence of powers in nature. At the same time, however, he recognizes causal judgments as genuine propositions that are not equivalent to statements of regularities. Hence, anti-realist interpretations are right to emphasize that Hume rejects an account of causation in terms of powers, but wrong to suppose that this leads him either to reductionism or emotivism. Causal realist interpretations are right to suppose that Hume attributes a non-reductionistic truth-value to causal statements, but wrong to think that the truth or falsity of these statements results from correspondence with powers. The intermediate position attributed to Hume is a version of quasi-realism about causation. It is sometimes argued that quasi-realism collapses into a version of either realism or anti-realism, but I outline a topic-independent conception of quasi-realism that allows it to stand as a consistent third alternative. (shrink)

La question de Hume, au regard de l'identite, n'est pas de savoir en quoi consiste l'identite ou s'il y a une identite, mais comment il est possible de l'affirmer. Elle concerne en fait, la question du fondement de l'identite. Il s'agit de prouver comment, a partir de la definition d'un soi envisage comme faisceau de perceptions, les perceptions du soi peuvent etre unifiees entre elles. ;Les conclusions auxquelles Hume parvient, dans le Livre I du Traite de la nature humaine, sont (...) l'admission d'un echec: sa theorie de la connaissance ne permet pas de fournir ce principe unificateur des perceptions. ;Dans la presente recherche, nous examinons l'hypothese a partir de laquelle la doctrine des relations de Hume, plus precisement celle de contiguite temporelle, jette une lumiere nouvelle sur la question de l'identite et represente une voie possible pour en elucider l'enigme. (shrink)

In Husserl's view of time, he offers a solution to the dilemma of the past and to its relation to the present and the future. The experience of the past exerts no influence causally. The body of past experience is not, in that sense, an entity at all. Husserl tells us that neither past is ever altogether absented from the present, for they form an integral whole. Temporal moments are conjointly experienced and conserved in the form of a series of (...) reverberating profiles, retaining and advancing one another in one continuous schema. They are related directly and immediately by what Husserl calls a "passive synthesis." ;It is characteristic of temporal phases to unify and separate internally within the act, without interrupting its progression or being separable from it. Each phase is intrinsic and essential to the performance of the others and is, thus, never an 'object' for them. Unlike Hume, and Brentano, too, insofar as he was an associationist, Husserl argues for a direct awareness of co-existent temporal segments, and of both identity and difference. The differing or negative status, attributed both to past and future, has an important role in defining and shaping the present. Husserl discovers a way to preserve the distinctions between the, differing temporal modes without denying their unity or the reality of the past . ;Husserl must address whether what he describes as a fully realized present can avoid being a substantive link between temporally distinct experiences instead of a principle of their association. That he understands and appreciates the difficulty is clear. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Derrida believe that Husserl emphasizes identity at the expense of difference. I shall assess these objections. What I shall claim is at issue in Husserl's view is as much the logic of difference as that of identity. Any solution, as he fully understands, which assumes that difference is inherently contradictory will never unify the series. (shrink)

Through close critical analyses of Hume's texts I have attempted to develop a new interpretative framework that makes Hume's arguments and positions more accessible, if not more plausible. More positively, The Reluctant Revolutionary is an attempt to defend what may be called a subjectivist interpretation of Hume's views on necessary connection. My central thesis is the suggestion that Hume identifies necessary connection or power with a specific psychological disposition of the mind--as he puts it in the Treatise: necessary connection 'is (...) a determination of the mind to carry our thoughts from one object to another.' ;But why would Hume subscribe to this radical thesis, one may wonder? A large part of my discussion is an attempt to answer this vital question. The book consists of four components. In Chapter One I begin with the argument that Hume views his discussion of necessary connection as central to the Treatise--if not as its centerpiece, and then go on to try to place this discussion in its immediate philosophical context which is the discussion on causality. ;After further deliberations on these two issues, in Chapter Three I proceed to outline, and critically evaluate the immediate arguments relied on by Hume to establish his view of necessary connection. For the most part, these do not strike me as convincing arguments. ;Finally, in Chapter Four I broaden my analysis of Hume's view of necessary connection, and try to develop an account of Hume's conception of the problem that motivates his radical view of necessary connection. As I try to point out, Hume is driven by an irrepressible urge for clarity and rigour in metaphysics--an urge that manifests itself, as I attempt to show, both in the radical nature of Hume's proposals, and in his depiction of the problem of necessary connection. For Hume depicts the problem of necessary connection as a dilemma, according to which metaphysicians either concede that the term 'necessary connection' is meaningless or accept that this term actually refers to a particular subjective psychological disposition, and not, for instance, to some external phenomenon. This chapter closes with a consideration of this dilemma, and its role in Hume's postulation of a radical view of necessary connection. (shrink)

At the close of his account of causality in the Treatise, Hume acknowledges that he had to adopt the “seemingly preposterous method” of examining the causal inference prior to analyzing the causal relation since the relation “depends so much on the inference” . This dependence emerges in his two definitions of ‘cause’ which, he concedes, seem “extraneous” to the causal relation. In this paper, I try to do what Hume did not do but could have done: fully describe the causal (...) relation so as to reach its core. That core is what I call “existential dependence,” the fact that one “object” exists because another exists. It turns out that Hume’s “preposterous method” is correct since existential dependence is what I call a “distributive” relation, a kind of conjunction that can be represented only by means of certain inferences. This makes existential dependence seem mysterious, but the mystery disappears if we interpret this dependence as probability, something that is comprehensible only through inferences. The key consequence of all of this is that we need to distinguish between the kind of causality that conforms to Hume’s two definitions of ‘cause’ and the kind of causality our causal inferences designate. (shrink)

The paper investigates whether causation is extrinsic in Humean Supervenience in the sense that being caused by is an intrinsic relation between token causes and effects. The underlying goal is to test whether causality is extrinsic for Humeans and intrinsic for anti-Humeans in this sense. I argue that causation is typically extrinsic in HS, but it is intrinsic to event pairs that collectively exhaust almost the whole of history.

Hume’s account of virtue (and beauty) entails that distinct things--a quality in the contemplated and a perception in the contemplator--are the same thing--a given virtue. I show this inconsistency is consistent with his intent. A virtue is a composite of quality and perception, and for Hume a composite is distinct things--the parts--falsely supposed to be a single thing. False or unsubstantiated supposition is for Hume the basis of most of our beliefs. I end with an argument that for Hume secondary (...) qualities are composites, not powers. (shrink)

Ontology was never Hume's main interest, but he certainly had opinions as to what there is, and he often expressed these in his philosophical works. Indeed it seems clear that Hume changed his ontological views while writing the Treatise, and that not just one but two different ontologies are to be found there. The ontology of Parts I, II, and III of Book I is more or less Lockean. There are minds and their operations and qualities. There are physical entities, (...) bodily actions and qualities if not bodies over and above these. And there are further entities, called ideas by Locke and perceptions by Hume, that represent things other than themselves, both physical and mental, while existing in and being dependent upon minds. In Part IV of Book I, however, and especially in Sections 2 and 6, a new ontology appears, one that differs not only from the doctrine of the earlier sections of the Treatise but also from any that previous philosophers had held. According to this new ontology, there are only perceptions: all other sorts of things are absorbed by or reduced to these, or else simply eliminated. Berkeley had indeed assimilated bodies and the properties of bodies to perceptions, but he had kept minds as a distinct category of entity. Hume went the whole way, making everything perceptions. We might characterise this new ontology as trans-Berkeleyan, or call it, on account of its similarity to later doctrines so named, phenomenalism or neutral monism. (shrink)

Hume’s views concerning the existence of body or external objects are notoriously difficult and intractable. The paper sheds light on the concept of body in Hume’s Treatise by defending three theses. First, that Hume’s fundamental tenet that the only objects that are present to the mind are perceptions must be understood as methodological, rather than metaphysical or epistemological. Second, that Hume considers legitimate the fundamental assumption of natural philosophy that through experience and observation we know body. Third, that many of (...) the contradictions and difficulties that interpreters attribute to Hume’s concept of body should be attributed instead, as Hume does, to every system of philosophy. (shrink)

The article argues that Meillassoux's 'After Finitude' underestimates the nature and profundity of Hume's sceptical challenge; it neglects the fact that Hume's scepticism concerns final causes (and agrees fundamentally with Bacon and Descartes in this respect), and that in Hume even the operations of reason do not furnish entirely a priori knowledge. We contend that Hume himself institutes a form of correlationism (which in part showed Kant the way to counter the sceptical challenge via transcendental idealism), and sought not merely (...) to abolish the 'principle of sufficient reason' but to salvage it in a weak form, in turning his attention to the grounds for our beliefs in necessity. We argue further that the 'mathematizability' of properties is not a sufficient criterion to yield realist, non-correlational knowledge, or to demonstrate the 'irremediable realism' of the 'ancestral' statement. Finally, we contend that Meillassoux himself relies on a certain 'Kantian moment' which exempts the reasoning subject from otherwise 'omnipotent' chaos, and that ultimately the 'speculative materialist' position remains exposed to the original Humean sceptical challenge. (shrink)

A specter is haunting Hume scholarship: the specter of the “New Hume.” Contrary to more traditional interpretations, according to which Hume rejects belief in any conception of causation that invokes (metaphysically) necessary connections between distinct existences, proponents of the New Hume hold that Hume at the least allowed for the possibility of such connections—it’s just that he thought we couldn’t know much, if anything, about them, if we assume that they do exist. -/- I will argue that the views of (...) the “New Humers” (as I shall call them) are mistaken. I will begin by discussing their reading of Hume on causation, using Galen Strawson as a foil. I then examine the relation between Hume’s view of relations (pun intended) and his account of “necessary connexions”. Next, I argue that this account, once properly understood, shows that he did not believe in what we would think of as necessary connections while at the same time explaining why, as the New Humers point out, Hume sometimes writes in ways that can make it sound like he does, as well as reconciling Hume’s two definitions of causation. After that, I answer objections, and then raise some doubts about Hume’s account before finally concluding the paper. (shrink)

Le problème de l’identité personnelle est une préoccupation essentielle des philosophes modernes depuis que la conscience est mise en scène philosophiquement. Cependant parmi eux il n’y en a pas beaucoup qui considèrent la mémoire comme le fondement de l’identité humaine, bien qu’aujourd’hui, et grâce aux neurosciences, on sache pourtant qu’elle joue un rôle capital. D’une manière générale, les empiristes s’y intéressent davantage que les rationnalistes. Ceux‐ci ayant comme idéal normatif les systèmes mathématiques ne pensent pas qu’elle puisse contribuer à élargir (...) nos connaissances du monde. C’est ce qui explique que le système des idées claires et distinctes chez Descartes, s’établit directement par la conscience présente. De son côté, l’empiriste sceptique Hume, bien qu’il ait souligné l’importance de la mémoire dans notre personnalité, n’a pas pu mettre en pleine lumière sa nature et son fonctionnement. L’esprit considéré comme l’ensemble des perceptions et des idées est loin de constituer l’identité de l’homme normal. On voit dans les théoriesbergsoniennes de la durée et de la mémoire une toute autre perspective qui fonde l’identité personnelle sur l’équilibre mental de la conscience présente et de l’inconscient, c’est‐à‐dire du moi superficiel et du moi profond. (shrink)

In the appendix to his Treatise Hume admits that his philosophy of mind is defective. Reluctantly he asserts that his thought has ensnared him in a labyrinth. Referring specifically to the section in the Treatise on personal identity and the self, the young Scot admits that he is “involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.” (Treatise 633) My paper is a critical investigation of (...) this characterization of Hume’s predicament. I argue (1) that at best Hume is facing a dilemma, not a labyrinth, and (2) that the dilemma can be solved, and (3) that the resolution to Hume’s problem can be found in his conception of intelligibility. (shrink)