Abstract

Stefanie Rocknak's stimulating, challenging, and highly original new book, Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, is helpfully summarized on its back cover as follows: This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume's conception of objects in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, Rocknak shows that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. But, she argues, he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believes that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On...