David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, composed before the author was twenty-eight years old, was published in 1739 and 1740. In revising the late L.A. Selby-Bigge's edition of Hume's Treatise Professor Nidditch corrected verbal errors and took account of Hume's manuscript amendments. He also supplied the text of theof the Treatise following the original 1740 edition and provided an apparatus of variant readings.

The latest volume in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this work brings together some of the best and most influential recent philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. Opening with a substantial introduction by John Richardson, it covers: Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge, his 'doctrines' of the eternal recurrence and will to power, his distinction between Apollinian and Dionysian art, his critique of morality, his conceptions of agency and self-creation, and his genealogical method. For each of these issues, the papers show (...) Nietzsche's continuing philosophical importance. Giving a clear and accessible overview, while retaining an analytical philosophical approach throughout, this volume is essential reading for all students of Nietzsche. (shrink)

The essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of the will, focusing on (1) Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of “willing” an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will; (2) Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally connected to the resulting action (at least not in a way sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and (3) Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis (...) of action. Particular attention is given to passages from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and a revised version of my earlier account of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism is defended. Finally, recent work in empirical psychology (Libet, Wegner) is shown to support Nietzsche’s skepticism that our “feeling” of will is a reliable guide to the causation of action. (shrink)

Nietzsche is one of the most important and controversial thinkers in the history of philosophy. His writings on moral philosophy are amongst the most widely read works, both by philosophers and non-philosophers. Many of the ideas raised are both startling and disturbing, and have been the source of great contention. On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained and important contribution to moral philosophy, featuring many of the ideas for which he is best known, including the slave revolt in (...) morals; will to power; genealogy; and perspectivism. The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Morality introduces the reader to these and other important Nietzschean themes patiently and clearly. It is the first book to examine the work in such a way, and will be a vital point of reference for any Nietzsche scholar, and essential reading for students coming to Nietzsche for the first time. (shrink)

This dissertation is a reconstruction of Hegel's theory of the individual knower. It takes the form of a commentary on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, a generally ignored section of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The commentary tries to avoid the trap of explaining Hegel and Hegelian jargon, aiming at a reader familiar with the history of philosophy and the Anglo-American tradition in the philosophy of mind. ;My reconstruction of Hegel's theory shows it to be an attempt to pay (...) the insights of the post-Cartesian philosophy of mind their due, without, however, getting entangled in the aporia engendered by the Cartesian framework. The most repugnant consequence of this framework, against which Hegel fought forcefully, is the conception of the thing-in-itself. This conception arises from accepting a representationalist model of all mental activity, for then reality is forever closed off to the thinker. Yet Hegel does not simply discard respresentationalism; rather, he attempts to elaborate a theory in which certain activities of the individual thinker are decidedly representationalistic, in particular intuition, imagination, and elementary symbol use, but thinking itself is understood non-representationally. In his consideration of the representational activities of the mind, we find Hegel dealing with many of the problems familiar from the empiricists and Kant, such as how particular mental acts can represent universals, and offering a sophisticated theory of levels of representational complexity. ; In his battle against the Cartesian tradition, Hegel invoked two important Aristotelian themes. First, Hegel's philosophy of mind is methodologically naturalistic, in that it is methodologically continuous with this theory of nature; his philosophy of mind is not founded upon any direct revelation of the mind to itself. The individual thinker does not occur as an item of an entirely different kind superadded to nature. Second, Hegel adopts a teleological view of the world--allowing him to say that though nature is first, spirit, as telos, is prior--and in particular that the ultimate telos is a universal active reason which takes the form of thought thinking thought. Because he then identifies this universal thought as the very substance of the world, and holds that the mental activity of the individual thinker can become identical with--not just a representation of--this universal thinking activity, he holds that even in the individual, thought is not representational. (shrink)