perspectives. But what then can be said about the historical dimension of the question regarding the compatibility of the natural and the normative? Generally speaking, the first thing to note is that early modern works often conjoin what has  ...

Other minds and their place in the Hume-literature -- A modern approach -- Scepticism versus naturalism -- The vulgar and the philosopher -- Relative ideas -- Concepts of the real -- Intuition and common sense -- Epistemic responsibility -- Degeneration of reason -- Just philosophy -- Conceiving minds -- Abstraction -- Argument from analogy -- Sympathy -- Limitations -- Generality -- Hume's concept of mind -- The world and the other -- Habit and intersubjective responsiveness -- Belief and education -- (...) Mental facts -- Signs of mind and world -- The belief-grounding function of sympathy -- Corrigibility of belief -- Cognitive architecture. (shrink)

We discuss the variety of sorts of sympathy Hume recognizes, the extent to which he thinks our sympathy with others’ feelings depends on inferences from the other’s expression, and from her perceived situation, and consider also whether he later changed his views about the nature and role of sympathy, in particular its role in morals.

This monograph is an important book for anyone interested in the topic of consciousness and personal identity in early modern thought. It offers a rich overview of the vast array of writers reflecting on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of persons, their responsibilities, the issue of immortality, and the development of an account of consciousness based on the way in which minds relate to their own thoughts and feelings. It traces the lines of influence from the scholastic background to Descartes and (...) through French, Scottish, and German debates on consciousness and personhood. The book thus represents an impressive attempt at offering a complete account of the different ideas that were passed... (shrink)

Hume?s account of sympathy has often been taken to describe what the discovery of so-called mirror neurons has suggested, namely, that we are able to understand one another?s emotions and beliefs through experiences that require no mediating thoughts and exactly resemble the experiences of the observed person. I will oppose this interpretation by arguing that, on Hume?s standard account, sympathy is a mechanism that produces ideas and beliefs prior to the emergence of shared feelings. To stress this aspect of Humean (...) sympathy is to show that the experiences, which mirror neurons apparently cause us to have, may well count as inferentially derived emotion-laden beliefs, thus undermining the opposition between experience-grounded and inference-based accounts of mind-reading. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

Philosophen der Frühen Neuzeit werden gemeinhin als Ideen-Theoretiker verstanden, wobei Ideen als eine Barriere zwischen dem denkenden Subjekt und der Welt begriffen werden. In dem vorliegenden Artikel geht es mir darum, eine kritische Überprüfung des überholten Begriffsschemas anhand einer Auseinandersetzung mit Humes Theorie der Assoziation anzuregen. Es wird gezeigt, dass Ideen in der Interaktion zwischen dem Subjekt und seiner sozialen und natürlichen Umwelt entstehen. So ist es nicht die innere Privatheit des Bewusstseins, die für die Herausbildung von Ideen maßgeblich ist, (...) sondern auf Erfahrung gestützte Gewohnheitsbildung und Assoziation. Die Etikettierung als Ideen-Theoretiker verdeckt diesen grundlegenden Aspekt frühneuzeitlichen Denkens, so dass es oft zu einer Überbetonung skeptischer Probleme und anschließenden Rettungsversuchen kommt, die einem besseren Verständnis eher hinderlich als förderlich sind. (shrink)

Hume holds that sympathy is both crucial for making moral judgments and a distorting influence that prevents us from assessing the virtue of characters impartially. He writes, When any quality, or character, has a tendency to the good of mankind, we are pleas’d with it, and approve of it; because it presents the lively idea of pleasure; which idea affects us by sympathy, and is itself a kind of pleasure. But as this sympathy is very variable, it may be thought, (...) that our sentiments of morals must admit of all the same variations. We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with foreigners. This essay will argue that Humean sympathy can play a .. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

David Hume gibt mit seiner Theorie personaler Identität Rätsel auf. Rätselhaft ist sie vor allem deshalb, weil er sich selbst in einem Appendix der Inkonsistenz bezichtigt, jedoch weder einen konkreten Grund dafür angibt, noch eine angemessen Lösung anbietet. Im Folgenden wird dargelegt, daß Humes Theorie personaler Identität für sich betrachtet keinen Grund für derlei Selbstbezichtigungen liefert. Tatsächliche Schwierigkeiten ergeben sich hingegen unter Berücksichtigung von Humes Wahrnehmungstheorie, in deren Zentrum der Begriff der Perzeption steht. Sowohl unseren Glauben an die eigene Identität (...) als auch unseren Glauben an materielle Wahrnehmungsobjekte erklärt Hume nämlich mittels desselben psychologischen Mechanismus. In beiden Fällen handelt es sich jedoch um ganz unterschiedliche Phänomene, die nicht auf dieselben Bedingungen zurückgeführt werden können. Gemäß dieser Interpretation ist eine Lösung des Problems für Hume unmöglich, weil sie zwangsläufig mit einer Revision seines Perzeptionsbegriffs, einer seiner zentralsten Kategorien, verbunden wäre. (shrink)

By investigating one of the major inconsistencies that Hume's parallel treatment of the identity of persons and objects issues, this essay offers an unconventional account of what it needs to avoid a dualist picture of mind and world. It will be argued that much hinges on the question of whether or not one is willing to allow the principally unperceivable to enter into one's concept of reality. Hume, as will be shown, rejects this approach: he denies that we have reason (...) to think that there are substances that divide the world into two separate realms. The strategic value of this move is that it enables us to think of minds in terms similar to those underlying our conception of physical objects without urging us to engage in reductionist or eliminativist projects. (shrink)

Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

We discuss the variety of sorts of sympathy Hume recognizes, the extent to which he thinks our sympathy with others’ feelings depends on inferences from the other’s expression, and from her perceived situation, and consider also whether he later changed his views about the nature and role of sympathy, in particular its role in morals.

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

_Sensibility in the Early Modern Era_ investigates how the early modern characterisation of sensibility as a natural property of the body could give way to complex considerations about the importance of affect in morality. What underlies this understanding of sensibility is the attempt to fuse Lockean sensationism with Scottish sentimentalism – being able to have experiences of objects in the world is here seen as being grounded in the same principle that also enables us to feel moral sentiments. Moral and (...) epistemic ways of relating to the world thus blend into one another, as both can be traced to the same capacity that enables us to affectively respond to stimuli that impinge on our perceptual apparatus. This collection focuses on these connections by offering reflections on the role of sensibility in the early modern attempt to think of the human being as a special kind of sensitive machine and affectively responsive animal. Humans, as they are understood in this context, relate to themselves by sensing themselves and perpetually refining their intellectual and moral capacities in response to the way the world affects them. Responding to the world here refers to the manner in which both natural _and_ man-made influences impact on our ability to conceptualise the animate and inanimate world, and our place within that world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Intellectual History Review. _. (shrink)

This essay argues that Humean impressions are triggers of associative processes, which enable us to form stable patterns of thought that co-vary with our experiences of the world. It will thus challenge the importance of the Copy Principle by claiming that it is the regularity with which certain kinds of sensory inputs motivate certain sets of complex ideas that matters for the discrimination of ideas. This reading is conducive to Hume’s account of perception, because it avoids the impoverishment of conceptual (...) resources so typical for empiricist theories of meaning and explains why ideas should be based on impressions, although impressions cannot be known to mirror matters of fact. (shrink)