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  1. 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 “spreading” (...)
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  2. Filling the Gaps in Hume’s Vacuums.Miren Boehm - 2012 - Hume Studies 38 (1):79-99.
    The paper addresses two difficulties that arise in Treatise 1.2.5. First, Hume appears to be inconsistent when he denies that we have an idea of a vacuum or empty space yet allows for the idea of an “invisible and intangible distance.” My solution to this difficulty is to develop the overlooked possibility that Hume does not take the invisible and intangible distance to be a distance at all. Second, although Hume denies that we have an idea of a vacuum, some (...)
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  3.  54
    Conceivability as the Standard of Metaphysical Possibility.Miren Boehm - 2025 - In Scott Stapleford & Verena Wagner (eds.), Hume and contemporary epistemology. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Hume establishes a link between our capacity to conceive or form “clear and distinct ideas” and metaphysical possibility. Hume’s so-called Conceivability Principle is usually assumed to be epistemic: conceivability is supposed to inform us of independent metaphysical facts. In this chapter, however, I argue that Hume is not engaged in modal epistemology. For Hume, there is no epistemic relation between conceivability and an independent metaphysical world of possibilities. On my reading, conceivability is more like the “mètre étalon” in Paris—the standard (...)
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  4. The Concept of Body in Hume’s Treatise.Miren Boehm - 2013 - ProtoSociology:206-220.
    Hume’s views concerning the existence of body or external objects are notoriously difficult and intractable. The paper sheds light on the concept of body in Hume’s Treatise by defending three theses. First, that Hume’s fundamental tenet that the only objects that are present to the mind are perceptions must be understood as methodological, rather than metaphysical or epistemological. Second, that Hume considers legitimate the fundamental assumption of natural philosophy that through experience and observation we know body. Third, that many of (...)
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  5. Certainty, Necessity, and Knowledge in Hume's Treatise (The editor of the collection accidentally published penultimate drafts. The version in Philpapers is the final draft--please use the final draft.).Miren Boehm - 2013 - In Stanley Tweyman (ed.), David Hume: A Tercentenary Tribute. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Caravan Books.
    Hume appeals to different kinds of certainties and necessities in the Treatise. He contrasts the certainty that arises from intuition and demonstrative reasoning with the certainty that arises from causal reasoning. He denies that the causal maxim is absolutely or metaphysically necessary, but he nonetheless takes the causal maxim and ‘proofs’ to be necessary. The focus of this paper is the certainty and necessity involved in Hume’s concept of knowledge. I defend the view that intuitive certainty, in particular, is certainty (...)
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  6. Time for Hume’s Unchanging Objects.Miren Boehm & Maité Cruz - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (16).
    In his discussion of our idea of time in the Treatise, Hume makes the perplexing claim that unchanging objects cannot be said to endure. While Hume is targeting the Newtonian conception of absolute time, it is not at all clear how his denial that unchanging objects are in time fits with this target. Moreover, Hume diagnoses our belief that unchanging objects endure as the product of a psychological fiction, but his account of this fiction is also riddled with puzzling claims (...)
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