Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himself, leading representatives of pragmatism, as well (...) as critical and legal theorists. The essays cover a range of subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory as well as the relation of major figures such as Hegel, Pierce, Mead and Dewey to Habermas and pragmatism. (shrink)

In The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), Dewey characterizes Hume as an orthodox empiricist wedded to a static and unchanging view of mental life. The lead essay argues that Darwinism is a cure for the errors of traditional empiricism. This paper demonstrates that Hume is a precursor to Darwin, and thus to Dewey, by reviewing the historical case that Hume directly influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution. Using Dewey’s discussion of the design versus chance problem, the paper throws light on (...) the origins of his misinterpretation of Hume, and suggests that the two thinkers are closer than Dewey’s criticism would allow. (shrink)

Hume's notion of conception is closer to Reid's than Reid realizes and may lie behind Hume's charge in the letter to Hugh Blair (1762) that Reid's philosophy "leads us back to innate ideas".

Hume uses the term 'idea' to refer to both mental acts and mental contents.

John Arbuthnot's celebrated but flawed paper in the Philosophical Transactions of 1711-12 is a philosophically and historically plausible target of Hume's probability theory. Arbuthnot argues for providential design rather than chance as a cause of the annual birth ratio, and the paper was championed as a successful extension of the new calculations of the value of wagers in games of chance to wagers about natural and social phenomena. Arbuthnot replaces the earlier anti-Epicurean notion of chance with the equiprobability assumption of (...) Huygens's mathematics of games of chance, and misrepresents the birth ratio data to rule out chance in favour of design. The probability sections of Hume's Treatise taken together correct the equiprobability assumption and its extension to other kinds of phenomena in the estimation of wagers or expectations about particular events. Hume's probability theory demonstrates the flaw in this version of the design argument. (shrink)

Contrariety is essential to Hume's notion of experience. Its role suggests that experience itself, its specificity, and the contrariety of events must be actual, not merely hypothetical.

The examples Hume relies on in _Treatise_ I.iv.2 raise questions about the role of contrariety in experience as it affects belief in the objects of perception.

The atomist Hume inherited by classical American pragmatism is a false Hume. I trace the origins and reception of the atomist Hume in the pragmatic tradition and the correction of this reading in modern Hume scholarship, and then argue (1) that in the Treatise Hume assumes that we first encounter wholes, not parts, in experience, (2) that the distinction of parts is possible only after the experience of wholes, and (3) that their distinction as well as their separation is not (...) real, pace James, but hypothetical. (shrink)

there are two lines of influence of David Hume on the history of classical American pragmatism: the familiar atomist-nominalist-associationist of empirical psychology reviled by Kantian and idealist critics, on the one side, and the conjectural historian and early developmentalist, or evolutionary, philosopher who was important to Darwin, on the other. The classical pragmatists received the first most directly through the work of Thomas Hill Green, in his edition of the Treatise of Human Nature—with its long critical introduction—that appeared in the (...) 1870s. In this essay I argue that the atomist of the traditional reading is a false Hume, with the hope that identification of the error will make way for a better... (shrink)

Belief is a species of mere conception, and is modifiable, rather than bivalent (believing or disbelieving). The attendant-impression theory of transformation of conception into belief expresses the moral dimension of one and the same thing, of which the manner-of-conception (without attendant impression) theory of the transformation refers to the epistemic dimension of that same thing. These two aspects of the transformation of conception into belief point to an ambiguity in Hume's use of the term IDEA: as act and as content. (...) The act of conception, its content, and the pedigree of that content are all mutually indeterminate. The imagination conceives, constructs contents, and transforms conception into belief. The foundation of the role of mere conception in belief is the mind's "native situation of indifference", which makes it possible for Hume to account not only for warranted but also unwarranted belief. Hume is interested not only in what should actuate the soul but what does so in fact. Hume's real innovation lies in a theory of belief unburdened by traditional representation and in the effects rather than the external foundations of certitude. (shrink)

Review of Frederic R. Kellogg, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., _Legal Theory And Judicial Restraint_ (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Review of Ryan Nichols, _Thomas Reid's Theory of Perception_ (Oxford University Press, 2007).