According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is not because (...) of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or (...) was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men. (shrink)

This paper deals with Hume’s theory of causation and his two definitions of cause. Hume’s theory of causation is based on the notions of priority, contiguity, constant conjunction and necessary connexion. The first problem is whether, according to Hume, necessary connexion is a basic part of causation. As Beebee claims, there are three distinct interpretations of Hume’s theory. The traditional interpretation claims that, according to Hume, there are only regular successions of events and necessary connexion or powers are incoherent part (...) of causation. According to projectivism, necessary connexion is an additional component that we project into the causation. Sceptical realism claims that Hume was a sceptic about knowing the real nature of powers but he believed that they exist in the external world. The second problem is whether projection or belief in necessary connexion is able to solve the problem of spurious causes. All three interpretations claim that we cannot know anything about powers or necessary connexion of events. The main goal of this paper is to argue that these interpretations cannot solve the problem of spurious causation. The Humean theory of causation is reduced only to the regular succession of events. (shrink)