Results for 'Hume’s Dictum'

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  1. Resurrecting the Hume's Dictum argument against metaethical non-naturalism.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-23.
    I argue for the viability of one neglected way of developing supervenience-based objections to metaethical non-naturalism. This way goes through a principle known as ‘Hume’s Dictum’, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I challenge several objections to the Hume’s Dictum-based argument. In the course of doing so, I formulate and motivate modest and precise versions of Hume’s Dictum, illustrate how arguments employing these principles might proceed, and argue that the (...)
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  2. Hume’s Dictum and Metaethics.Victor Moberger - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279):328-349.
    This paper explores the metaethical ramifications of a coarse-grained criterion of property identity, sometimes referred to as Hume's dictum. According to Hume's dictum, properties are identical if and only if they are necessarily co-extensive. Assuming the supervenience of the normative on the natural, this criterion threatens the non-naturalist view that there are instantiable normative properties which are distinct from natural properties. In response, non-naturalists typically point to various counterintuitive implications of Hume's dictum. The paper clarifies this strategy (...)
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  3. Model Theory, Hume's Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical Theory.Jack Woods & Barry Maguire - 2017 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4:419-440.
    It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s (...), is of a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)
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  4. From Hume's Dictum Via Submergence to Composition as Identity or Mereological Nihilism.Einar Duenger Bohn - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):336-355.
    I show that a particular version of Hume's Dictum together with the falsity of Composition as Identity entails an incoherency, so either that version of Hume's Dictum is false or Composition as Identity is true. I conditionally defend the particular version of Hume's Dictum in play, and hence conditionally conclude that Composition as Identity is true. I end by suggesting an alternative way out for a persistent foe of Composition as Identity, namely mereological nihilism.
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  5. Morgan’s Canon, meet Hume’s Dictum: avoiding anthropofabulation in cross-species comparisons.Cameron Buckner - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):853-871.
    How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...)
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  6. Hume’s Separability Principle, his Dictum, and their Implications.Graham Clay - 2024 - Mind 133 (530):504-516.
    Hsueh M. Qu has recently argued that Hume’s famed ‘Separability Principle’ from the Treatise entangles him in a contradiction. Qu offers a modified principle as a solution but also argues that the mature Hume would not have needed to avail himself of it, given that Hume’s arguments in the first Enquiry do not depend on this principle in any form. To the contrary, I show that arguments in the first Enquiry depend on this principle, but I agree with (...)
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  7. Composition as a Kind of Identity.Phillip Bricker - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):264-294.
    Composition as identity, as I understand it, is a theory of the composite structure of reality. The theory’s underlying logic is irreducibly plural; its fundamental primitive is a generalized identity relation that takes either plural or singular arguments. Strong versions of the theory that incorporate a generalized version of the indiscernibility of identicals are incompatible with the framework of plural logic, and should be rejected. Weak versions of the theory that are based on the idea that composition is merely analogous (...)
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  8. Structural Parsimony.Ghislain Guigon - manuscript
    Many metaphysicians often appeal to Hume’s dictum (HD), according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct entities (or states of entities), in order to resist theories that commit us to such connections. Some have argued that HD is an unsupported dogma of metaphysics. But theories that commit us to necessary connections between distinct goings-on can also be resisted by invoking a normative twist on HD, which I call the Humean Solvent (HS): “Do not connect distinct entities (...)
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  9. Lawful Persistence.David Builes & Trevor Teitel - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):5-30.
    The central aim of this paper is to use a particular view about how the laws of nature govern the evolution of our universe in order to develop and evaluate the two main competing options in the metaphysics of persistence, namely endurantism and perdurantism. We begin by motivating the view that our laws of nature dictate not only qualitative facts about the future, but also which objects will instantiate which qualitative properties. We then show that both traditional doctrines in the (...)
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  10. Fundamentality And Modal Freedom.Jennifer Wang - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):397-418.
    A fundamental entity is an entity that is ‘ontologically independent’; it does not depend on anything else for its existence or essence. It seems to follow that a fundamental entity is ‘modally free’ in some sense. This assumption, that fundamentality entails modal freedom (or ‘FEMF’ as I shall label the thesis), is used in the service of other arguments in metaphysics. But as I will argue, the road from fundamentality to modal freedom is not so straightforward. The defender of FEMF (...)
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    Why Hume's Notion of Demonstration Must Reduce to Probability.Stefanie Rocknak - 2024 - In Scott Stapleford & Verena Wagner (eds.), Hume and contemporary epistemology. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper shows that Hume was ultimately forced to conclude in The Treatise that all demonstrative and intuited claims can in fact, be imagined as otherwise. As a result, he was forced to conclude that all knowledge claims must, ultimately, reduce to probable claims, or in Hume’s own, and indisputably clear words: “all knowledge degenerates into probability." As a further result, it is suggested (briefly) that this anticipates Quine’s well-known attack on the analytic / synthetic distinction (Quine 1953).
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  12. Hume's emotivist theory of moral judgements.James Chamberlain - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):1058-1072.
    Hume is believed by many to hold an emotivist thesis, according to which all expressions of moral judgements are expressions of moral sentiments. However, most specialist scholars of Hume either deny that this is Hume's position or believe that he has failed to argue convincingly for it. I argue that Hume is an emotivist, and that his true arguments for emotivism have been hitherto overlooked. Readers seeking to understand Hume's theory of moral judgements have traditionally looked to the first section (...)
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  13. The Strength of Hume's "Weak" Sympathy.Andrew S. Cunningham - 2004 - Hume Studies 30 (2):237-256.
    Hume’s understanding of sympathy in section 2.1.11 of the Treatise—that it is a mental mechanism by means of which one sentient being can come to share the psychological states of another—has a particularly interesting implication. What the sympathizer receives, according to this definition, is the passing psychological “affection” that the object of his sympathy was experiencing at the moment of observation. Thus the psychological connection produced by Humean sympathy is not between the sympathizer and the “other” as a “whole (...)
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  14. Hume’s “projectivism” explained.Miren Boehm - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):815-833.
    Hume appeals to a mysterious mental process to explain how to world appears to possess features that are not present in sense perceptions, namely causal, moral, and aesthetic properties. He famously writes that the mind spreads itself onto the external world, and that we stain or gild natural objects with our sentiments. Projectivism is founded on these texts but it assumes a reading of Hume’s language as merely metaphorical. This assumption, however, conflicts sharply with the important explanatory role that (...)
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  15. Hume’s Optimism and Williams’s Pessimism From ‘Science of Man’ to Genealogical Critique.Paul Russell - 2018 - In Sophie Grace Chappell & Marcel van Ackeren (eds.), Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 37-52.
    Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this is that (...)
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  16. Hume's Epistemology: The State of the Question.Hsueh M. Qu - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):301-323.
    This article surveys the state of the literature on Hume’s epistemology, focusing on treatments of what has come to be known as the ‘Kemp Smith problem’, that is, the problem of reconciling Hume’s scepticism with his naturalism. It first surveys the literature on this issue with regard to the Treatise, moving on to briefly compare the Treatise and the Enquiry in virtue of their epistemological frameworks, before finally examining the literature with regard to the first Enquiry.
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  17. Infinity, Choice, and Hume's Principle.Stephen Mackereth - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophical Logic.
    It has long been known that in the context of axiomatic second-order logic (SOL), Hume's Principle (HP) is mutually interpretable with "the universe is Dedekind infinite" (DI). I offer a more fine-grained analysis of the logical strength of HP, measured by deductive implications rather than interpretability. The main result is that HP is not deductively conservative over SOL + DI. That is, SOL + HP proves additional theorems in the language of pure second-order logic that are not provable from SOL (...)
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  18. Hume's general point of view: A two‐stage approach.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3):431-453.
    I offer a novel two-stage reconstruction of Hume’s general-point-of-view account, modeled in part on his qualified-judges account in ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’ In particular, I argue that the general point of view needs to be jointly constructed by spectators who have sympathized with (at least some of) the agents in (at least some of) the actor’s circles of influence. The upshot of the account is two-fold. First, Hume’s later thought developed in such a way that it can (...)
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  19. Hume’s Two Definitions: The Procedural Interpretation.Helen Beebee - 2011 - Hume Studies 37 (2):243-274.
    Hume's two definitions of causation have caused an extraordinary amount of controversy. The starting point for the controversy is the fact, well known to most philosophy undergraduates, that the two definitions aren't even extensionally equivalent, let alone semantically equivalent. So how can they both be definitions? One response to this problem has been to argue that Hume intends only the first as a genuine definition—an interpretation that delivers a straightforward regularity interpretation of Hume on causation. By many commentators' lights, however, (...)
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  20. Hume's Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Physical Science.Matias Slavov - 2020 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    This book contextualizes David Hume's philosophy of physical science, exploring both Hume's background in the history of early modern natural philosophy and its subsequent impact on the scientific tradition.
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  21. Hume’s Theory of Causation: Is There More Than One?James Hill - 2011 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 33 (2):233-249.
    It is traditionally assumed that there is only one theory of causality in Hume's writings. In this article it is shown that we can distinguish between an early and mature theory. It is argued that the mature theory, strongly influenced by Newton's physics, accords with the New Hume interpretation by asserting that real causal relations are not accessible to the human mind.
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  22. Hume’s Fork and Mixed Mathematics.Matias Slavov - 2017 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (1):102-119.
    Given the sharp distinction that follows from Hume’s Fork, the proper epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics seems to be a mystery. On the one hand, mathematical propositions concern the relation of ideas. They are intuitive and demonstratively certain. On the other hand, propositions of mixed mathematics, such as in Hume’s own example, the law of conservation of momentum, are also matter of fact propositions. They concern causal relations between species of objects, and, in this sense, they (...)
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  23. Hume’s Passion-Based Account of Moral Responsibility.Taro Okamura - 2023 - Hume Studies 48 (2):195-216.
    Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate responses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s (...)
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  24. Hume's Real Riches.Charles Goldhaber - 2022 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 39 (1):45–57.
    Hume describes his own “open, social, and cheerful humour” as “a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year.” Why does he value a cheerful character so highly? I argue that, for Hume, cheerfulness has two aspects—one manifests as mirth in social situations, and the other as steadfastness against life’s misfortunes. This second aspect is of special interest to Hume in that it safeguards the other virtues. (...)
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  25. Hume’s practically epistemic conclusions?Hsueh Qu - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (3):501-524.
    The inoffensive title of Section 1.4.7 of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, ‘Conclusion of this Book’, belies the convoluted treatment of scepticism contained within. It is notoriously difficult to decipher Hume’s considered response to scepticism in this section, or whether he even has one. In recent years, however, one line of interpretation has gained popularity in the literature. The ‘usefulness and agreeableness reading’ (henceforth U&A) interprets Hume as arguing in THN 1.4.7 that our beliefs and/or epistemic policies are (...)
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  26. Hume's "General Rules".James Chamberlain - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    In this paper, I examine Hume’s account of an important class of causal belief which he calls “general rules”. I argue that he understands general rules, like all causal beliefs, as lively ideas which are habitually associated with our impressions or memories. However, I argue, he believes that they are unlike any reflectively produced causal beliefs in that they are produced quickly and automatically, such that they occur independently of any other processes of reasoning. Given this, I argue, Hume (...)
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  27. How to Prove Hume’s Law.Gillian Russell - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 51 (3):603-632.
    This paper proves a precisification of Hume’s Law—the thesis that one cannot get an ought from an is—as an instance of a more general theorem which establishes several other philosophically interesting, though less controversial, barriers to logical consequence.
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  28. Hume’s Lengthy Digression": Free Will in the Treatise.Paul Russell - 2014 - In Donald C. Ainslie & Annemarie Butler (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume's Treatise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 231-251.
    David Hume’s views on the subject of free will are among the most influential contributions to this long-disputed topic. Throughout the twentieth century, and into this century, Hume has been widely regarded as having presented the classic defense of the compatibilist position, the view that freedom and responsibility are consistent with determinism. Most of Hume’s core arguments on this issue are found in the Sections entitled “Of liberty and necessity,” first presented in Book 2 of A Treatise of (...)
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  29. Hume's Colors and Newton's Colored Lights.Dan Kervick - 2018 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 16 (1):1-18.
    In a 2004 paper, “Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue Reconsidered from a Newtonian Perspective,” Eric Schliesser argues that Hume’s well-known discussion of the missing shade of blue “reveals considerable ignorance of Newton’s achievement in optics,” and that Hume has failed to assimilate the lessons taught by Newton’s optical experiments. I argue in this paper, contrary to Schliesser, that Hume’s views on color are logically and evidentially independent of Newton’s results. In developing my reading, I will argue that (...)
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  30. Laying Down Hume's Law.Hsueh Qu - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):24-46.
    In this paper, I argue for an interpretation of Hume's Law that sees him as dismissing all possible arguments from is to ought on the basis of a comparison with his famous argument on induction.
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  31. Hume's Positive Argument on Induction.Hsueh Qu - 2013 - Noûs 48 (4):595-625.
    Discussion on whether Hume's treatment of induction is descriptive or normative has usually centred on Hume's negative argument, somewhat neglecting the positive argument. In this paper, I will buck this trend, focusing on the positive argument. First, I argue that Hume's positive and negative arguments should be read as addressing the same issues . I then argue that Hume's positive argument in the Enquiry is normative in nature; drawing on his discussion of scepticism in Section 12 of the Enquiry, I (...)
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  32. Hume's Appendix Problem and Associative Connections in the Treatise and Enquiry.Daniel R. Siakel - 2018 - Hume Studies 44 (1):23-50.
    Given the difficulty of characterizing the quandary introduced in Hume’s Appendix to the Treatise, coupled with the alleged “underdetermination” of the text, it is striking how few commentators have considered whether Hume addresses and/or redresses the problem after 1740—in the first Enquiry, for example. This is not only unfortunate, but ironic; for, in the Appendix, Hume mentions that more mature reasonings may reconcile whatever contradiction(s) he has in mind. I argue that Hume’s 1746 letter to Lord Kames foreshadows (...)
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  33. Hume’s Answer to Bayle on the Vacuum.Jonathan Cottrell - 2019 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 101 (2):205-236.
    Hume’s discussion of space in the Treatise addresses two main topics: divisibility and vacuum. It is widely recognized that his discussion of divisibility contains an answer to Bayle, whose Dictionary article “Zeno of Elea” presents arguments about divisibility as support for fideism. It is not so widely recognized that, elsewhere in the same article, Bayle presents arguments about vacuum as further support for fideism. This paper aims to show that Hume’s discussion of vacuum contains an answer to these (...)
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  34. Hume's Reading of the Classics at Ninewells, 1749–51.Moritz Baumstark - 2010 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 8 (1):63-77.
    This article provides a re-evaluation of David Hume's intensive reading of the classics at an important moment of his literary and intellectual career. It sets out to reconstruct the extent and depth of this reading as well as the uses – scholarly, philosophical and polemical – to which Hume put the information he had gathered in the course of it. The article contends that Hume read the classics against the grain to collect data on a wide range of cultural information (...)
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  35. Hume's Reality: A Lesson in Causality.Stefanie Rocknak - 2003 - In David G. Murray (ed.), Proceedings Metaphysics 2003 Second World Conference. Foundazione Idente di Studi e di Ricerca,.
    In Book I, III §9 of the Treatise, Hume makes the claim that “[all general] belief arises only from causation” (T 107). Following, he makes the even stronger claim that all general beliefs are to be thought of as beliefs in reality, and thus, all belief in reality is dependent on pre-established beliefs in both specific causal relations and the causal relation in general (T 108). In the first part of this paper, I explain Hume’s motivation behind both claims, (...)
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  36. Hume's Dispositional Account of the Self.Hsueh Qu - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4):644-657.
    This paper will argue that Hume's notion of the self in Book 2 of the Treatise seems subject to two constraints. First, it should be a succession of perceptions. Second, it should be durable in virtue of the roles that it plays with regard to pride and humility, as well as to normativity. However, I argue that these two constraints are in tension, since our perceptions are too transient to play these roles. I argue that this notion of self should (...)
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  37. Hume's Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature.Don Garrett - forthcoming - In Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (ed.), Hume's _A Treatise of Human Nature_: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Hume describes “mental geography” as the endeavor to know “the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder, in which they lie involved, when made the object of reflection and enquiry.” While much has been written about his geography of thought in Treatise Book 1, relatively little has been written about his geography of feeling in Books 2 and 3, with the result that (...)
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  38. Hume's Anatomy of Virtue.Paul Russell - 2013 - In Daniel C. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to virtue ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 92-123.
    In his Treatise of Human Nature Hume makes clear that it is his aim to make moral philosophy more scientific and properly grounded on experience and observation. The “experimental” approach to philosophy, Hume warns his readers, is “abstruse,” “abstract” and “speculative” in nature. It depends on careful and exact reasoning that foregoes the path of an “easy” philosophy, which relies on a more direct appeal to our passions and sentiments . Hume justifies this approach by way of an analogy concerning (...)
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  39. Nonconceptualism, Hume’s Problem, and the Deduction.Anil Gomes - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (7):1687-1698.
    Lucy Allais seeks to provide a reading of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories which is compatible with a nonconceptualist account of Kant’s theory of intuition. According to her interpretation, the aim of the Deduction is to show that a priori concept application is required for empirical concept application. I argue that once we distinguish the application of the categories from the instantiation of the categories, we see that Allais’s reconstruction of the Deduction cannot provide an answer to Hume’s (...)
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  40. Hume's Legacy and the Idea of British Empiricism.Paul Russell - 2012 - In Alan Bailey & Dan O'Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume. Continuum. pp. 377.
    David Hume’s views on the subject of free will are among the most influential contributions to this long-disputed topic. Throughout the twentieth century, and into this century, Hume has been widely regarded as having presented the classic defense of the compatibilist position, the view that freedom and responsibility are consistent with determinism. Most of Hume’s core arguments on this issue are found in the sections entitled “Of liberty and necessity,” first presented in Book 2 of A Treatise of (...)
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  41. David Hume’s skepticism in Thomas Reid’s reading.Vinícius França Freitas - forthcoming - Filosofia Unisinos:1-15.
    The paper advances the hypothesis that, in Thomas Reid's reading, David Hume's skepticism of the Treatise on Human Nature is not solely due to his acceptance of the ‘ideal hypothesis’ – the principle according to which ideas are the immediate objects of the mental operations –, but it has another source, namely, that doubt on the reliability of the faculties of the senses, memory, and reason. Moreover, the paper argues that the suggested distinction between two roots for Hume’s skepticism (...)
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  42. Hume’s Science of Emotions: Feeling Theory without Tears.Mark Collier - 2011 - Hume Studies 37 (1):3-18.
    We must rethink the status of Hume’s science of emotions. Contemporary philosophers typically dismiss Hume’s account on the grounds that he mistakenly identifies emotions with feelings. But the traditional objections to Hume’s feeling theory are not as strong as commonly thought. Hume makes several important contributions, moreover, to our understanding of the operations of the emotions. His claims about the causal antecedents of the indirect passions receive support from studies in appraisal theory, for example, and his suggestions (...)
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  43. Hume's Social Epistemology and the Dialogue Form.Daryl Ooi - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.
    Hume begins his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by providing a discussion on what an ideal dialogue ought to look like. Many considerations that Hume raises coincide with similar concerns in contemporary social epistemology. This paper examines three aspects of Hume’s social epistemology: epistemic peerhood, inquiry norms and the possibility of rational persuasion. Interestingly, however, I will argue that the conversation between Philo, Cleanthes and Demea falls short of meeting Hume’s articulated standard of what an ideal dialogue ought to (...)
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  44. Hume's theory of space and time in its sceptical context.Donald L. M. Baxter - 1993 - In David Fate Norton & Jacqueline Taylor (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 105-146.
    Hume's Treatise arguments concerning space, time, and geometry, especially ones involving his denial of infinite divisibility; have suffered harsh criticism. I show that in the section "Of the ideas of space and time," Hume gives important characterizations of his skeptical approach, in some respects Pyrrhonian, that will be developed in the rest of the Treatise. When that approach is better understood, the force of Hume's arguments can be appreciated, and the influential criticisms of them can be seen to miss the (...)
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  45. Hume's Methodology and the Science of Human Nature.Vadim V. Vasilyev - 2013 - History of Philosophy Yearbook 2012:62-115.
    In this paper I try to explain a strange omission in Hume’s methodological descriptions in his first Enquiry. In the course of this explanation I reveal a kind of rationalistic tendency of the latter work. It seems to contrast with “experimental method” of his early Treatise of Human Nature, but, as I show that there is no discrepancy between the actual methods of both works, I make an attempt to explain the change in Hume’s characterization of his own (...)
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  46. Hume's Treatise and Hobbes's the Elements of Law.Paul Russell - 1985 - Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1):51.
    The central thesis of this paper is that the scope and structure of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is modelled, or planned, after that of Hobbes's The Elements of Law and that in this respect there exists an important and unique relationship between these works. This relationship is of some importance for at least two reasons. First, it is indicative of the fundamental similarity between Hobbes's and Hume's project of the study of man. Second, and what is more important, by (...)
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  47. Hume's Foundational Project in the Treatise.Miren Boehm - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy.
    In the Introduction to the Treatise Hume very enthusiastically announces his project to provide a secure and solid foundation for the sciences by grounding them on his science of man. And Hume indicates in the Abstract that he carries out this project in the Treatise. But most interpreters do not believe that Hume's project comes to fruition. In this paper, I offer a general reading of what I call Hume's ‘foundational project’ in the Treatise, but I focus especially on Book (...)
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  48. Hume’s Scepticism in Masaryk’s Essay About Probability and in His Other Papers.Zdeněk Novotný - 2011 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 33 (2):179-203.
    It was Hume's concept of knowledge that marked Masaryk's philosophy more than influential Kant. Masaryk devoted Hume his inaugural lecture The Probability Calculus and Hume's Scepticism at Prague University in 1882. He tried to face his scepticism concerning causation and induction by a formula P = n: or P = : where P means the increasing probability that an event that had happened n times in the past will happen again. Hume stresses that there is an essential difference between probability (...)
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  49. Hume's Theory of Property.George E. Panichas - 1983 - Archiv Fur Rechts - Und Sozialphilosphie 69 (3):391-405.
    This article starts by identifying the phenomena that Hume thought to explain the need, hence utility, of a rudimentary system of property. Then, and prominently, it considers Hume’s arguments for believing that only a system of private property is justifiable. Hume argues that only in a society with adequate but not absolute abundance and altruism does property have a point or purpose. Property’s basic job, then, is that of addressing conflict and disagreement among persons of limited altruism and means, (...)
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  50. Hume’s Two Causalities and Social Policy: Moon Rocks, Transfactuality, and the UK’s Policy on School Absenteeism.Leigh Price - 2014 - Journal of Critical Realism 13 (4):385-398.
    Hume maintained that, philosophically speaking, there is no difference between exiting a room out of the first-floor window and using the door. Nevertheless, Hume’s reason and common sense prevailed over his scepticism and he advocated that we should always use the door. However, we are currently living in a world that is more seriously committed to the Humean philosophy of empiricism than he was himself and thus the potential to act inappropriately is an ever-present potential. In this paper, I (...)
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