Hume, Misc

Christian apologists argue that the testimony of the miracles of Jesus provide evidence for Christianity. Hume tries to undermine this argument by pointing out that miracles are said to occur in other religious traditions and so miracles do not give us reason to believe in Christianity over the alternatives. Thus, competing miracles act as an undercutting defeater for the argument from miracles for Christianity. Yet, before Hume, Locke responds to this kind of objection, and in this paper I explain and (...) defend his response. In short, Locke argues that God will ensure that there is more evidence for Christianity (if true) and this greater evidence is an undercutting defeater for Hume’s competing miracles defeater (i.e., it is a defeater-defeater). If so, then, as Locke argues, competing miracles do not weaken the evidence from miracles for Christianity. (shrink)

A brief review of my How To Think Like a Philosopher, drawing attention to the valuable thinking of David Hume and some Scottish connections.

We are pleased to say that Hume Studies has awarded its second annual Essay Prize, with an announcement featured in this issue. The winning paper will be published in November 2023 (Hume Studies 48:2). We thank the members of the 2022–23 Prize Committee, who are acknowledged in the announcement. Please see the Call for Papers for the Third Annual Essay Prize on page 189 of this issue.Along with five original articles and three book reviews, our current issue features a symposium (...) on Margaret Watkins’s book, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays” (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The symposium is a development from an Author-Meets-Critics panel that was held at the 47th Hume Society Conference, sponsored by... Read More. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ IntroductionElizabeth S. Radcliffe and Mark G. SpencerThis issue opens with the winning essay in the Second Annual Hume Studies Essay Prize competition: “Hume’s Passion-Based Account of Moral Responsibility,” by Taro Okamura. Dr. Okamura’s essay was chosen as the 2022 winner from among papers submitted by emerging scholars from August 2021 through July 2022. Dr. Okamura received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2022. He is currently (...) a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo.The competition for the Third Prize closed on August 1, 2023, and the winner will be announced in our next issue. Please see the Call for Papers for the fourth competition in the back of this issue. The competition is open to authors ten or fewer years from the Ph.D.A special aspect of our current issue is its spotlight on Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Renowned Dutch Enlightenment scholar, Frederic L. van Holthoon, presents his analysis of some of Hume’s essays, which he argues constitute Hume’s project of writing on political, or public, issues—a goal he did not get to complete with the Treatise. Also, established Hume scholar Lorne Falkenstein offers an extended review of the newly published Clarendon edition of Hume’s essays, in two volumes (edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and Mark A. Box, with Michael Silverthorne, J. A. W. Gunn, and F. David Harvey).Finally, we want to bring to the attention of our readers that, in fewer than two years, Hume Studies will be marking the 50th anniversary of its first publication. For this event, we are planning a special jubilee issue, 50:1 (April 2025). We hope to include among the unique features of that issue paragraphs or statements from our readers in answer to this query: “Of all of the articles that have been published in Hume Studies over the past 50 years, which one is most noteworthy to you? Why so?” Please see the “Call for Entries” in the back of this issue and on the Hume Studies website. We invite your responses! [End Page 193]Copyright © 2023 Hume Studies... (shrink)

The new two volume edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, edited by Tom Beauchamp and Mark Box, is the first critical edition.[3] What primarily distinguishes a critical edition is that it collates the copy-text with all other editions and provides a complete record of variations in the texts. Beauchamp and Box provide readers with detailed, informative notes and annotations that describe the variations and revisions that have been made to the Essays published within Hume’s lifetime. They also provide (...) a table that catalogues the contents of the various editions from 1741 to 1771 and several helpful appendixes relating to their publication. The final text of the essays has been carefully edited and annotated. The second volume contains the editors’ extensive annotations, which are both informed and illuminating. All the editorial work has been done with enormous attention to detail and precision.... (shrink)

This special issue originated in a workshop of June 2017 on ‘Hume’s Thought and Hume’s Circle’ at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in the University of Edinburgh. Among t...

This is our initial issue as co-editors of Hume Studies. We thank our predecessors, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer, and Amy M. Schmitter, for their years of editorial oversight and for their assistance in the transition. Some of the papers they began shepherding through the editorial process will be appearing in our issues.Regular readers of the journal will notice that volume 46 is dated 2020, while this first issue of volume 47 is dated April 2022. The journal has been behind the (...) calendar for many years and catching up is essential. So, the Hume Society Executive Committee and the Hume Studies Editorial Board approved a proposal to advance the publication cover date to the current date. Subscribers will of course be... (shrink)

This issue of Hume Studies opens with the winner of the inaugural Hume Studies Essay Prize, Aaron Alexander Zubia’s excellent essay, “Hume’s Transformation of Academic Skepticism.” The Prize was awarded this past year in a competition among contending papers submitted from January 1 through August 1, 2021.The Hume Studies Essay Prize is an annual award in the amount of $1,000 US made possible by the support of the Hume Society. The Essay Prize is an ongoing competition for those who submit (...) papers to Hume Studies and are ten or fewer years from receiving the Ph.D., including current graduate students. Entries for the second prize closed on August 1, 2022. Papers submitted before that date are undergoing the usual... (shrink)

Sandy, as he was known to so many Hume scholars, died peacefully in Salisbury, England on July 30, 2021. For many years, Sandy welcomed Hume scholars to Edinburgh where he was often found working in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Departments of the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. He shared his vast knowledge of all things Humean in conversation with visitors from all parts of the world, as well as in his many publications. He was especially (...) generous with his time and expertise to younger Hume scholars at the start of their careers.In various collections including Studies in The Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and in the co-edited Hume and Hume's Connexions Sandy... (shrink)

En mi opinión, uno de los grandes problemas de la academia colombiana consiste en que hay una profunda ignorancia acerca de lo que están haciendo nuestros colegas en otras universidades. Desconocemos su trabajo y, en el peor de los casos, no lo tomamos como punto de referencia porque, a priori, no lo consideramos bueno. En no pocas ocasiones, la bibliografía que acompaña los syllabus de los cursos que dictamos no contiene artículos o libros de filósofos colombianos que, sin importar su (...) calidad, deberíamos incluir. No sólo deberíamos incluirlos para saber qué están produciendo nuestros colegas, sino también porque criticarlos, mostrar sus puntos débiles y fuertes, es lo que debe hacer la academia y lo que genera un conocimiento vigoroso y robusto... (shrink)

This volume of Hume Studies is a special double-issue devoted to discussions of four recent books on Hume: Hume: an Intellectual Biography, by James Harris; Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, by Stefanie Rocknak; Hume's True Scepticism, by Donald Ainslie; and Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume's Philosophy, by Jacqueline Taylor. The latter three discussions began as Author-Meets-Critics sessions at the 43rd International Hume Conference in Sydney, Australia, and the present volume keeps the AMC format: each discussion starts (...) with a short précis of the book from the author, followed by comments from three respondents, and concludes with the author's reply. The selection of books... (shrink)

The new editorial team, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer and Amy Schmitter, are very pleased to present this special double-issue of Hume Studies. It contains a wide variety of articles on subjects old and new, as well as an assortment of book reviews, commissioned by the new book review editor, David Landy of San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the many people who have helped us get this volume and our tenure as editors underway, including the preceding editors-in-chief, Angela (...) Coventry and Peter Kail, and preceding book review editor, Annemarie Butler, as well as the previous editors-in-chief Corliss Swain and Saul Traiger, who offered invaluable advice about procedures, practices, and technological issues.... (shrink)

David Hume’s theory of action is well known for several provocative theses, including that passion and reason cannot be opposed over the direction of action. In Hume, Passion, and Action, the author defends an original interpretation of Hume’s views on passion, reason and motivation that is consistent with other theses in Hume’s philosophy, loyal to his texts, and historically situated. This book challenges the now orthodox interpretation of Hume on motivation, presenting an alternative that situates Hume closer to “Humeans” than (...) many recent interpreters have. Part of the strategy is to examine the thinking of the early modern intellectuals to whom Hume responds. Most of these thinkers insisted that passions lead us to pursue harmful objects unless regulated by reason; and most regarded passions as representations of good and evil, which can be false. Understanding Hume’s response to these claims requires appreciating his respective characterizations of reason and passion. The author argues that Hume’s thesis that reason is practically impotent apart from passion is about beliefs generated by reason, rather than about the capacity of reason. Furthermore, the argument makes sense of Hume’s sometimes-ridiculed description of passions as “original existences” having no reference to objects. The author also shows how Hume understood morality as intrinsically motivating, while holding that moral beliefs are not themselves motives, and why he thought of passions as self-regulating, contrary to the admonitions of the rationalists. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this is that (...) both his views and his methods evolved and shifted in significant ways, especially around the time that he wrote and published Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (i.e. the early 1980s). One way of gauging and assessing these changes in Williams’ views and outlook is to consider his relationship and attitude to other philosophers during this period. Of particular interest is his changing attitude to the moral philosophy of David Hume. This relationship is of considerable importance, not only because it serves as a useful tool for the interpretation of Williams’ views but also because it provides us with some critical insight into the respective strengths and weaknesses of both Hume’s and Williams’ contributions. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Eugenio Lecaldano’s way of tackling the issue of the meaning of life. I highlight the dependence of his individualistic approach on the specific character of the person who inquires into the meaning of life. I also sketch a weaker way of understanding the meaning of life as an attempt to provide reasons which are valid from the standpoint of the present, and which will make us continue living.

Most of Polish translations of David Hume’s essays have been collected in two well-known volumes edited by T. Tatarkiewiczowa and Ł. Pawłowski, but some of them were also published in various scientific journals. Moreover, some are also available in two, or even three Polish versions, whereas some were not available in Polish until they were translated and published in several issues of this journal. The dissipation of translations and functioning of various versions of their titles cause problems for Hume scholarship (...) in Poland. In answer to this problem the article collates all existing Polish translations of Hume’s essays. (shrink)

"I tend to agree with more dialectical positions such as Noxon's who, even being a critic of the approach of the two concepts, writes the following: Hume explained certain mental phenomena, notably belief, as effects of the association. And, going further, I say that belief is a feeling or sensation aroused by two factors: habit and the association of ideas, but it does not arise either from one or from other singly, each one is a part of a process that (...) involves both. Therefore habit is an underlying principle which acts upon reasonable beings during their observation of constant conjunctions, in such a way that imagination can associate ideas only through this principle acting in the mind. However, as I have already stated in another text, such an association realised by the imagination will catch up to its certainty status just with the emergence of a feeling which imputes necessity to what is instead merely contingent" (Sample taken up from the text). (shrink)

Foreword from the Guest Editor to the special issue of Diametros – “Enlightenment and Secularism.”.

Carolyn Korsmeyer has offered some compelling arguments for the role of disgust in aesthetic appreciation. In the course of this project, she considers and holds up for justifiable criticism the account of emotional conversion proposed by David Hume in “Of Tragedy”. I will consider variant interpretations of Humean conversion and pinpoint a proposal that may afford an explanation of the ways in which aesthetic absorption can depend on and be intensified by the emotion of disgust.

When David Hume wrote to Baron de Montesquieu ‘J’ai consacré ma vie à la philosophie et aux belles-lettres’,1 he was not describing himself as having two separate callings. His was a single vocation — one involving the expression of deep thought through beautiful writing.2 This vocation did not come naturally or easily to Hume. He struggled continually to reshape his approach to prose, famously renouncing the Treatise of Human Nature as a literary failure and radically revising the presentation of his (...) philosophy in the Essays and two Enquiries. This essay will focus on Hume’s struggle between two modes of moral-philosophical composition prevalent in his day: the cold, unemotional style associated with experimental science that Hume metaphorically labels anatomy’ and the warm, rhetorical style which he labels ‘painting’. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher David Hume is widely regarded as the greatest and most significant English-speaking philosopher and often seen as having had the most influence on the way philosophy is practiced today in the West. His reputation is based not only on the quality of his philosophical thought but also on the breadth and scope of his writings, which ranged over metaphysics, epistemology, morals, politics, religion, and aesthetics. The Handbook's 38 newly commissioned chapters are divided into six parts: Central Themes; (...) Metaphysics and Epistemology; Passion, Morality and Politics; Aesthetics, History, and Economics; Religion; Hume and the Enlightenment; and After Hume. The volume also features an introduction from editor Paul Russell and a chapter on Hume's biography. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Hume's Life and Works - James Harris -/- Part I Central Themes 2. Naturalism and Skepticism in the Philosophy of Hume - Barry Stroud; 3. Reason, Normativity and Hume's "Title Principle" - Don Garrett; 4. Reflexivity and Sentiment in Hume's Philosophy - Annette Baier; 5. Hume's Skeptical Realism - John Wright; 6. Hume's Chief Argument - Peter Millican; 7. Hume's Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism - Paul Russell PART II METAPHYSICS & EPISTEMOLOGY 8. Hume's Theory of Ideas - Wayne Waxman; 9. Hume and the Molyneux Problem - Henry E. Allison; 10. Hume on Space and Time - Donald L. M. Baxter; 11. Hume's Skeptical Logic of Induction - Kenneth P. Winkler; 12. Hume and the Problem of Causation - Helen Beebee; 13. Hume on the External World - Georges Dicker; 14. Hume on Personal Identity - Galen Strawson PART III PASSIONS, MORALITY & POLITICS 15. Hume on Pride and the Other Indirect Passions - Jacqueline Taylor; 16. The Nature and Functions of Sympathy in Hume's Philosophy - Rico Vitz; 17. Reason, Belief, and the Passions - David Owen; 18. Hume on Practical Reason: Against the Normative Authority of Reason - Karl Schafer; 19. Hume, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility - Tony Pitson; 20. Hume on Is and Ought: Logic, Promises, and the Duke of Wellington- Charles Pigden; 21. Hume, Morality, and Skepticism - Simon Blackburn; 22. Hume on the Artificial Virtues - Geoffrey Sayre-McCord; 23. Hume and Virtue Ethics - Christine Swanton; 24. Hume's Political Philosophy - Neil McArthur. PART IV AESTHETICS, HISTORY, & ECONOMICS 25. Hume, Kant and the Standard of Taste - Paul Guyer:26. Hume's Taste and the Rationalist Critique - Peter Kivy: 27. Hume's History of England - Donald T. Siebert: 28. Hume's Philosophical Economics - Tatsuya Sakamoto PART V HUME & the ENLIGHTENMENT 34. Newton and Hume- Yoram Hazony & Eric Schliesser; 35. Hume and Smith on Moral Philosophy - Ryan Patrick Hanley; 36. Hume and the Contemporary "Common Sense" Critique of Hume - Lorne Falkenstein Part VI After Hume 37. Hume and Nietzsche - Peter Kail; 38. Hume and Cognitive Science - Jesse Prinz; Bibliography and Further Reading; Index -/- . (shrink)

This book argues that Rasselas can be understoodd most fully if regarded in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical discussions of the nature of the human soul.

The main goal of the article is to reconstruct the conceptual bases of the original sociological project contained in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The core of Humean sociology is a meticulously designed doctrine of passions. The foci of the Humean doctrine of passions are the questions of influences observed between the emotional component of human nature and the multiple forms of human actions. According to David Hume, the faculty of imagination, which operates on ideas, is not by itself (...) able to supply a set of regular and uniform practices for an agent. The real foundations for any agent’s habitual form of action are always emotions and passions. The influences of emotions and passions on an agent have various natures: emotions as the primary impressions initiate actions performed by an agent, and passions, as secondary impressions, put these activities into a regular and uniform shape. These very passions define the nature and structure of an agent’s habits, avoiding the traditional logical difficulties in solving the riddle of induction. A habit does not arise as a simple result from the multiple performances of these or that actions, but it is formed by predilections of an agent of activity. Against the backgrounds of a burgeoning interest in contemporary social sciences and a variety of practice-oriented theories and concepts, Humean sociology finds a new theoretical practicality, demonstrating the strength of its arguments and the ability to become a new important source of conceptual intuitions in the social sciences. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 2 Seiten: 234-260.

It is well known that Hume excluded inferior rational beings, who are incapable of resistance and weak resentment, from his concept of justice. This resulted in a critique of Hume’s theory of justice, as it would not protect those who were the most vulnerable against ill treatment. The typical answer to this critique is that Hume excluded inferior rational beings from the concept of justice, but not from that of morality, and that he considered their protection to be the task (...) of humanity. The subject of this text is the range of Hume’s humanity. What manner of protection does Hume’s humanity truly offer? Despite the conclusion that this manner of protection of the vulnerable is insufficient, Hume’s humanity contains valuable characteristics worthy of re-evaluation in modern debate — both on the limits of humanity and on the conditions and models of protecting the vulnerable. (shrink)