In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume and Davidson on Pride Pall S. krdal In reading the Treatise one has to be alive to the fact that Hume gives certain crucial words new meanings. He does not always draw the reader's attention to this and sometimes explicitly claims to be using terms with their ordinarymeaningswhen heis clearlygiving the words special technical uses by expanding or contracting their usual meanings. "Passion," "love," "hatred," "pride," and "humility" (...) have special meanings in Hume's psychological scheme. He also sometimes uses important terms with more than one meaning, as in the case of "justice." The word "justice" both is the title of Book 3, Part 2 of the Treatise, which deals with a number ofartificial virtues, and alsorefers to the much narrower concept ofthe respectfor property. The following two questions should be borne in mind: "What did Hume have to say about what he calls justice, passion, love, etc.?" and "What did Hume have to say about what we refer to by the same terms?" Thus, Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise may be described as attempting to show how unbiased evaluations are possible, in spite ofthe fact that our passions are naturally biased and judgments of virtue and vice are passions. This clearly involves a discussion of how we can do justice to our own and other peoples' qualities ofmind or character. Hume, therefore, had something very important to say about what we call justice, but his contribution to issues involving what we call justice today is obscured by his terminology. In what follows I shall be claiming that Hume's account of pride throws light upon what we call pride although he clearly was not aiming to do so. Donald Davidson, in a footnote to "Hume's Cognitive Theory of Pride," points out that there is a close similarity between his reading ofHume on pride andmy own treatment ofprideinPassionand Value. Since the two accounts were arrived at completely independently, each ofus can see the other'sinterpretation as some confirmation ofhis own. The accounts are not identical, however, and without aiming at a comprehensive comparison, I shall attempt to decide whether one or two ofthe apparent differences between our accounts indicate substantial disagreement. I shall try not to confuse the following four questions: "What did Hume thinkconstitutes pride?""Whatlesson do I, and whatlesson does Davidson think one could learn from Hume's account?" and finally, "What constitutes pride?" Davidson and I agree that a lesson is to be Volume XV Number 2 387 PALL ARDAL learned from Hume's account, but disagree about the nature of this lesson because of a disagreement about the nature of pride. Both Davidson and I think that Hume's claim that pride is a simple impression is an embarrassment to him. It does not have any immediate appeal and also leads him to clearly misrepresent the relation between pride and its object. Pride has self as its object in the sense that it is a form of self-evaluation. Hume misrepresents this relation as a causal relation between pride and the thoughtofoneself. Whenever one is proud, one's thought is drawn to oneself, but according to Hume it couldhave been otherwise. Itjust so happens that the feeling ofpride makes one think of oneself, that when you are already proud your thought turns to yourself. Hume, it is true, does not always represent the relation between the object of pride and the passion itself as contingent. Much ofwhathe says suggests the more plausible view that pride is essentially a form of self-evaluation, but the lesson we can learn from Hume we can learn in spite ofhis atomism, so let us follow Davidson and disregard the atomism, while admitting its presence in Hume's account. Davidson points out that the pride Hume is talking about is pride for a reason. I follow Hume in talking about the cause ofpride, or what makes one proud, but the two accounts seem to me to be very similar on this issue. The two accounts are alsoin agreement thatHume should have said that the proud person must see the cause of pride as having value rather than as an independent source of pleasure, but we are... (shrink)

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible the (...) speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation. (shrink)

I MAKE NO APOLOGIES for writing about this well-worn topic. For, although there has been an enormous amount written about the account Hume gives of the nature of moral evaluation, commentators are as far from agreement as ever. My own contribution to the controversy has, if anything, not only added to the variety of opinions but also has increased the general confusion. For this I must accept some responsibility. I have certainly laid myself open to some misinterpretation, and the view (...) I have so far expressed in print may also need some modification. I shall here attempt to clarify what precisely my view now is, and why I prefer it to some alternative views advanced by those who find my interpretation of this aspect of Hume's philosophy unacceptable. II. Since what I want to defend is in all important respects my earlier interpretation of the Treatise, 2 I shall for the most part, though not exclusively, be concerned with what Hume says in this, his early, but major, work. (shrink)

In his highly interesting ‘Hume's Criterion of Significance,’ Michael Williams makes some references to my paper ‘Convention and Value.’ He writes that I am ‘on to something important,’ but, although he claims that my conclusion is not modest enough, he fails to make clear what modesty requires. As a result, our interpretations may seem further apart than they really are. I shall attempt to draw attention to some of our agreements and differences.

This thesis is neither e page to page commentary nor en assessment of Hume's place in the history of Philosophy. It mainly consists in an attempt at justifying a certain approach to the Interpretation of his theory of value with special reference to morals.