Cover of Hume Studies
>> Go to Current Issue

Hume Studies

Volume 37, Issue 2, November 2011

Table of Contents

Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-10 of 10 documents


articles
1. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Tatsuya Sakamoto Hume’s “Early Memoranda” and the Making of His Political Economy
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This essay argues that while the so-called “Hume’s Early Memoranda” has long been regarded as Hume’s juvenile work composed before A Treatise of Human Nature, there is significant internal and external evidence to the contrary. M. A. Stewart’s recent thesis made a new attempt to move the period of composition to the early 1740s. I seek in the following essay to date the composition even later, in the latter half of the 1740s. Re-examined in this new light, the memoranda credibly emerges as a work of preparation for Hume’s political economy to be published as Political Discourses in 1752. Historical and biographical details thus reconstructed around the process of Hume’s composition of the memoranda reveal the hitherto-unrecognized complexity with which Hume’s economic thought was gradually formed in close and profound connections with his moral, political and historical thinking.
2. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Michael B. Gill Humean Sentimentalism and Non-Consequentialist Moral Thinking
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Of the many objections rationalists have raised against moral sentimentalism, none has been more long-lived and central than the claim that sentimentalism cannot accommodate the non-consequentialist aspects of our moral thinking. I examine how Stephen Darwall directs this criticism at Hume’s account of moral judgment and argue that Darwall’s criticism is based on an incorrect interpretation of Hume’s view of motivation and the moral sentiments. Humean moral psychology is more nuanced than Darwall’s objection in particular and rationalist criticisms more generally have assumed. Developing a clear picture of why Hume’s account of moral judgment does not imply an implausible consequentialism reveals the strength of Hume’s moral sentimentalism overall.
3. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Yumiko Inukai Perceptions and Objects: Hume’s Radical Empiricism
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to use the term “object” to refer to different things in different contexts, including impressions, ideas, perceptions, and bodies. Does he ever use the term “external bodies” to refer to things in the extra-mental world? I argue that what Hume means by external bodies when he affirms their existence is not externally existing, material objects that are somehow presented to the mind or presented in impressions. Rather, the bodies that Hume affirms are, at bottom, no different from perceptions, but they can be distinguished from merely internal perceptions like pain or pleasure in terms of their “different relations, connexions, and durations” (T 1.2.6.9; SBN 68). I conclude that in order to be consistent, given the various statements he makes throughout Book One of the Treatise, Hume must reject the philosopher’s doctrine of double existence of perceptions and objects and affirm only the existence of perceptions, sometimes conceived as internally existing and mind-dependent and sometimes conceived as existing outside and independent of the mind.
4. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Tim Black Hume’s Epistemic Naturalism in the Treatise
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
We can understand epistemic naturalism as the view that there are cases in which we are justified in holding a belief and cases in which we are not so justified, and that we can distinguish cases of one sort from cases of the other with reference to non-normative facts about the mechanisms that produce them. By my lights, Hume is an epistemic naturalist of this sort, and I propose in this paper a novel and detailed account of his epistemic naturalism. On my account, which I call the determinacy account, Hume characterizes epistemic justification in terms of the mind’s feeling determined by the relation of cause and effect to move from one impression (or idea) to an(other) idea. I find a statement of this account, which Hume applies initially to what he calls the second system of realities, in Treatise 1.3.9. After rejecting other accounts of Hume’s epistemic naturalism, I show how the determinacy account handles the cases Hume considers later in Treatise 1.3.
5. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Helen Beebee Hume’s Two Definitions: The Procedural Interpretation
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Hume scholars have long disputed how we should understand his famous “two definitions” of causation. A serious problem with existing accounts is that they fit uneasily with Hume’s claim in the Treatise that the two definitions correspond to causation considered separately as a “natural” and as a “philosophical” relation. This paper advances a new interpretation of the two definitions, according to which they represent an account of two different psychological mechanisms that generate causal judgments. This interpretation is fully consistent with Hume’s claim that the two definitions map onto his distinction between natural and philosophical relations, once that distinction is itself properly understood.
book reviews
6. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Esther Kroeker Thomas Reid. Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Edited by James A. Harris and Knud Haakonssen
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
7. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Gerald J. Postema Annette C. Baier. The Cautious, Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
bibliography
8. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
James Fieser The Hume Literature 2010
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
9. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Index to Volume 37
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
10. Hume Studies: Volume > 37 > Issue: 2
Hume Studies Referees, 2010–2011
view |  rights & permissions | cited by