Hume’s Determinism

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (4):611-642 (2010)
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Abstract

David Hume has traditionally been assumed to be a soft determinist or compatibilist, at least in the ‘reconciling project’ that he presents in Section 8 of the first Enquiry, entitled ‘Of liberty and necessity.’ Indeed, in encyclopedias and textbooks of Philosophy he is standardly taken to be one of the paradigm compatibilists, rivalled in significance only by Hobbes within the tradition passed down through Locke, Mill, Schlick and Ayer to recent writers such as Dennett and Frankfurt. Many Hume scholars also concur in viewing him as a determinist, for example Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, A. J. Ayer, Paul Russell Don Garrett, Terence Penelhum, George Botterill, John Bricke, and John Wright. My main purpose in this paper will be to provide the evidence to substantiate this traditional interpretation, which has hitherto been widely assumed rather than defended. In the absence of such a defence, the consensus has been left open to challenge, most notably in a recent paper and a subsequent book by James Harris, who boldly claims that Hume ‘does not subscribe to determinism of any kind, whether Hobbesian or merely nomological.’

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Citations of this work

Hume's Positive Argument on Induction.Hsueh Qu - 2013 - Noûs 48 (4):595-625.
Motivational determinism.Eric Christian Barnes - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (3):211-227.

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References found in this work

Cognition and commitment in Hume's philosophy.Don Garrett - 1996 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The rise of physicalism.David Papineau - 2001 - In Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer, Physicalism and its Discontents. New York: Cambridge University Press.
A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will.Robert Kane - 2005 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy.Don Garrett - 1997 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 62 (1):191-196.
Hume.Barry Stroud - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (4):597-601.

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