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Hume Studies

Volume 41, Issue 1, April 2015

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1. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Lisa Ievers The Method in Hume’s “Madness”
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Hume’s response to his dramatic encounter with skepticism in the Treatise is well known: his skepticism dissipates when he socializes with others in the comparatively amusing sphere of common life. As many commentators have noted, however, this “response” to skepticism is really no response at all. In this paper, I show that the charge that Hume provides a non-response to skepticism at T 1.4.7.9 (SBN 269) is misplaced, for what is standardly interpreted as Hume’s skepticism in the preceding paragraph is not skepticism. Instead, I argue, it is the condition of “madness,” a disordered mental state in which “every loose fiction” enjoys the same status as a “serious conviction” (T 1.3.10.9; SBN 123). Hume’s alleged response to skepticism at T 1.4.7.9 (SBN 269) would indeed be unsatisfying, if he were responding to skepticism. As a response to madness, it is perfectly adequate.
2. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Jennifer Welchman Self-Love and Personal Identity in Hume’s Treatise
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Do the first two books of Hume’s Treatise form a “compleat chain of reasoning” on the subject of personal identity? Not if a complete chain of reasoning is one that explains the origin of the fictitious beliefs that we remain identical through time, “as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves.” Book 1 explains how we come to believe that we are persisting subjects of conscious experience of an external world. Book 2 explains our belief that we are persisting subjects of passions and powers of practical agency. But neither explains the origin of the mistaken belief that we are also persisting objects of our own practical agency or the equally mistaken belief that we are naturally and powerfully disposed to “concern” for ourselves. If we are not the enduring objects of our practical agency and if, as Hume explicitly states in Book 2, we do not love our “selves,” how do we come to make these mistakes? And what actually plays the causal role in moral and social life vulgarly attributed to self-love? Were Hume to leave these phenomena unexplained, his chain of reasoning regarding personal identity would be incomplete. Hume supplies this account in Book 3. Thus the first two Books do not form a complete chain of reasoning as regards personal identity.
book symposium: andrew sabl’s hume’s politics: coordination and crisis in the history of england
3. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Willem Lemmens “Sweden Is Still a Kingdom”: Convention and Political Authority in Hume’s History of England
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4. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Mark G. Spencer “Distant and Commonly Faint and Disfigured Originals”: Hume’s Magna Charta and Sabl’s Fundamental Constitutional Conventions
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5. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Ryu Susato “Politics May Be Reduced To a Science”? Between Politics and Economics in Hume’s Concepts of Convention
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6. Hume Studies: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Andrew Sabl Reply to My Critics
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