Online research in philosophy

A Treatise of Human Nature opens with ambitious hopes for the science of man, but Hume eventually launches into a series of skeptical arguments that culminates in a report of radical skeptical despair. This essay is a preliminary exploration of how to interpret this surprising development. I first distinguish two kinds of surprise twist: those that are incompatible with some preceding portion of the work, and those that are not. This suggests two corresponding pictures of Hume. On one picture, he believed the skeptical development to be at odds with something in early Treatise; on the other, he took these two portions of Book 1 to be perfectly compatible. After defending the claim that Hume endorsed both of these portions, I sketch two promising interpretations—a “perspectivist,” incompatibilist interpretation and a “post-skeptical,” compatibilist interpretation—and offer some reasons to favor the latter view.

This paper examines the function of Hume’s use of a peculiar example from A Treatise of Human Nature. The example in question is that of a burning piece of coal that is whirled around at a sufficient speed to present to a viewer an image of a circle of fire. The example is a common one; and Hume himself points to Locke as his source in this case. Hume’s reference appears accurate since both Locke and Hume seem to marshal the example in order to bolster a case for an upper and lower temporal threshold for perception. But several philosophical problems inherent in Hume’s appeal to the example make the case for Locke as Hume’s sole or even primary source difficult to sustain. The paper sketches a history of uses of the example from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. An argument is presented that Pierre Bayle’s use of the example is most in accord with Hume’s, and that for this and other reasons, Bayle is his likeliest source. Further, making sense in this way of Hume’s use of the burning coal example illuminates Hume’s interesting contributions to the notions of time, identity, and individuation.

Hume’s views on language have been widely misunderstood. Typical discussions cast Hume as either a linguistic idealist who holds that words refer to ideas or a proto-verificationist. I argue that both readings are wide of the mark and develop my own positive account. Humean signification emerges as a relation whereby a word can both indicate ideas in the mind of the speaker and cause us to have those ideas. If I am right, Hume offers a consistent view on meaning that is neither linguistic idealism nor positivism but a genuine alternative to these, one that deserves to be taken seriously.

There are two major puzzles in Hume’s epistemology. The first involves Hume’s fall into despair in the conclusion of Book One of the Treatise. When Hume reflects back upon the results of his research, he becomes so alarmed that he nearly throws his books and papers into the fire. Why did his investigations push him towards such intense skeptical sentiments? What dark discoveries did he make? The second puzzle concerns the way in which Hume emerges from this skeptical crisis and proceeds with his investigations. Why the sudden change of heart? What accounts for the return of hope? Each of these puzzles represents a serious challenge to traditional approaches to Hume’s epistemology. A proper solution to them requires a careful examination of Hume’s claims about the untrustworthiness of our cognitive faculties as well as his strategy for improving their performance.

P. J. E. Kail's Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy is an excellent book, consisting—like Hume's Treatise itself—of three excellent parts. I will comment on one central aspect of its second part: its explanation of the source of the second thoughts that Hume famously expressed, with a frustrating lack of specificity, about his own initial discussion of personal identity in the Treatise.As is well known, Hume holds in the section "Of personal identity" (T 1.4.6) that a self, mind, or person is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions" (T 1.4.6.4; SBN 252) and, more specifically, a "system of different perceptions or different existences link'd together by the relation of cause and ..

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume's treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the "Appendix" to the Treatise. Hume's project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. The belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the "vulgar" who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think of their perceptions. The author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the "Appendix." He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the "Appendix" must meet.

An appreciation of Hume's psychology of object identity allows us to recognize certain tensions in his discussion of the origin of our belief in personal identity-tensions which have gone largely unnoticed in the secondary literature. This will serve to provide a new solution to the problem of explaining why Hume finds that discussion of personal identity so problematic when he famously disavows it in the Appendix to the Treatise. It turns out that the two psychological mechanisms which respectively generate the ideas of object and of personal identity are mutually incompatible. It is this sort of conflict within Hume's introspective or subjectivist psychology which is the source of his worry.

An appreciation of Hume's psychology of object identity allows us to recognize certain tensions in his discussion of the origin of our belief in personal identity-tensions which have gone largely unnoticed in the secondary literature. This will serve to provide a new solution to the problem of explaining why Hume finds that discussion of personal identity so problematic when he famously disavows it in the Appendix to the Treatise. It turns out that the two psychological mechanisms which respectively generate the ideas of object and of personal identity are mutually incompatible. It is this sort of conflict within Hume's introspective or subjectivist psychology which is the source of his worry.

Since the publication of Annette Baier's seminal A Progress of Sentiments, with its emphasis on Hume as a naturalistic philosopher mainly interested in the social and passionate aspects of our lives, we have witnessed an explosion of interpretations arguing that there are two ideas of the self in the Treatise.1 On the one hand, the idea of self as a bundle of perceptions discussed in "Of personal identity" at the end of Book 1,2 and, on the other hand, an idea of self produced by the passions and of relevance to Hume's practical philosophy dealt with in Books 2 and 3. Just to mention a few, we have Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, who is actually a forerunner to Baier, Pauline Chazan, Susan Purviance, and less clearcut ..

This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume’s conception of objects in Book I of the Treatise. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, I show that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. However, I argue that he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believed that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On the other hand, he thought that we only imagine such causes when we reach a “philosophical” level of thought. This tension manifests itself in Hume’s account of personal identity; a tension that, I argue, Hume acknowledges in the Appendix to the Treatise. As a result of presenting a detailed account of Hume’s conception of objects, we are forced to accommodate new interpretations of, at least, Hume’s notions of belief, personal identity, justification and causality.