This article looks at the vigorous questioning of the immortality of the soul during the early modern period. It offers an account of some significant aspects of the philosophy of the soul in the early modern period and of its transformation across that period. It proposes a thesis about the place of the soul in early modern conceptions of what it meant to be a human animal and traces the contribution of the early modern philosophy of the soul to the (...) enlightened science of human nature. (shrink)

This chapter concerns Hume's account in Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) of the operation of ‘general rules’. It considers their relation to conceptions of regularity, probability, circumstance, and experience that obtained in early modern logic and natural philosophy, taking occasion to reflect upon the significance of Hume's claim, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that natural philosophy and moral philosophy are ‘derived from the same principles’. It concludes by suggesting that a number of Hume's essays are (...) structured as reflections and refinements upon commonly-held general rules. (shrink)