In this paper I compare Hume's account of the causes of our belief in body in T 1.4.2 ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses’ (SWRS)1 with his account of the causes of religious belief in the Nat...

This paper discusses what the function of the aesthetic sense is for Hutcheson, and how its function bears on a number of exegetical issues viz. Whether there is any possibility of objectivity within the scope of the theory and what the status of his analogy between secondary qualities and beauty actually amounts to. I argue that the aesthetic sense is analogous to a prevalent account of bodily sensations, which saw bodily sensation as having the function jointly signalling and eliciting motivational (...) dispositions toward features that are harmful or beneficial to the body. The aesthetic sense is supposed to motivate us toward gaining knowledge of the world, and allows for a standard of taste relative to its function. The paper is a complement to my 'Hutcheson's Moral Sense', History of Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming 2001). (shrink)

Speech variability facilitates non-tonal language speakers’ lexical tone learning. However, it remains unknown whether tonal language speakers can also benefit from speech variability while learning second language (L2) lexical tones. Researchers also reported that the effectiveness of speech variability was only shown on learning new items. Considering that the first language (L1) and L2 probably share similar tonal categories, the present study hypothesizes that speech variability only promotes the tonal language speakers’ acquisition of L2 tones that are different from the (...) tones in their L1. To test this hypothesis, the present study trained native Mandarin (a tonal language) speakers to learn Cantonese tones with either high variability (HV) or low variability (LV) speech materials, and then compared their learning performance. The results partially supported this hypothesis: only Mandarin subjects’ productions of Cantonese low level and mid level tones benefited from the speech variability. They probably relied on the mental representations in L1 to learn the Cantonese tones that had similar Mandarin counterparts. This learning strategy limited the impact of speech variability. Furthermore, the results also revealed a discrepancy between L2 perception and production. The perception improvement may not necessarily lead to an improvement in production. (shrink)

Religion and the external world -- Projection, religion, and the external world -- The senses, reason and the imagination -- Realism, meaning and justification : the external world and religious belief -- Modality, projection and realism -- 'Our profound ignorance' : causal realism, and the failure to detect necessity -- Spreading the mind : projection, necessity and realism -- Into the labyrinth : persons, modality, and Hume's undoing -- Value, projection, and realism -- Gilding : projection, value and secondary qualities (...) -- The gold : good, evil, belief and desire -- The golden : relational values, realism and a moral sense. (shrink)

Hume's 'Natural History of Religion' offers a naturalized account of the causes of religious thought, an investigation into its 'origins' rather than its 'foundation in reason'. Hume thinks that if we consider only the causes of religious belief, we are provided with a reason to suspend the belief. I seek to explain why this is so, and what role the argument plays in Hume's wider campaign against the rational acceptability of religious belief. In particular, I argue that the work threatens (...) a form of fideism which maintains that it is rationally permissible to maintain religious belief in the absence of evidence or of arguments in its favour. I also discuss the 'argument from common consent', and the relative superiority of Hume's account of the origins of religious belief. (shrink)

The original occasion for most of the chapters contained in this book was the result of a wish to establish a forum where Hume scholars of various provenances and convictions could meet and discuss all matters Humean, profiting from the very differences that commonly would make it difficult for them to cross paths with each other. This wish materialised in an interdisciplinary workshop, ‘Hume Studies in Britain’, held in Cambridge in September 2000. The title of the book is intended to (...) reflect that original interdisciplinary approach: Hume has made different impressions on the different areas of investigation here represented. Thus his writings can be taken as transparent vehicles for philosophical intuitions, problems, and arguments that are still at the centre of philosophical reflection today. On the other hand, there are readings that try to locate Hume's views against the background of concerns, debates and discussions of his own time. Hume's texts may be read as highly sophisticated literary-cum-philosophical creations: in such cases, the reader's attention tends to be directed at issues of genre and persuasive strategies rather than philosophical questions and arguments. Or they may be regarded as moments in the construction of the ideology of modernity, and as contributions to the legitimation of a given social order. As the true classics that they are, Hume's works are typical ‘open texts’, in which readers keep finding an ever new and varied bounty of inspirations. The borders between these approaches are far from neat; and this book intends to promote as much trespassing as possible between them. (shrink)

The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page.

This paper discusses the metaphor of projection in relation to Hume’s treatment of causal necessity. I argue that the best understanding of projection shows it to be compatible with taking Hume to be a ‘sceptical realist’ about causal necessity, albeit an agnostic one.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Meaning and the Copy Principle External Objects Causal Power The Self and Necessary Connection Acknowledgments References.

This paper examines Hume’s ‘Title Principle’ and its role in a response to one of the ‘manifest contradictions’ he identifies in the conclusion to Book I of A Treatise on Human Nature. This ‘contradiction’ is a tension between two ‘equally natural and necessary’ principles of the imagination, our causal inferences and our propensity to believe in the continued and distinct existence of objects. The problem is that the consistent application of causal reason undercuts any grounds with have for the belief (...) in continued and distinct existence, and yet that belief is as ‘natural and necessary’ as our propensity to infer effects from causes. The TP appears to offer a way to resolve this ‘contradiction’. It statesWhere reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us.’ In brief, if it can be shown that the causal inferences that undermine the belief in external world are not ‘lively’ nor mixed with some propensity’ then we have grounds for think that they have no normative authority. This is in part a response to another ‘manifest contradiction’, namely the apparently self-undermining nature of reason. In this paper I examine the nature and grounds of the TP and its relation to these ‘manifest contradictions’. (shrink)

Christian Emden’s informative book has a number of explicit aims: the first aim is to “reconstruct Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism”; the second aim is to show “that there are specific historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt a position best understood in terms of philosophical naturalism”; and the third aim is to show “how Nietzsche’s naturalism and his understanding of the life sciences tie in with genealogy.”1 In pursuit of these aims, Emden divides the book into three parts, one titled “Varieties (...) of Philosophical Naturalism,” the second “Evolution and the Limits of Teleology,” and the third “Genealogy, Nature and Normativity.” In this article I shall concentrate mainly on Emden’s discussion of... (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of Hume’s “Natural History of Religion” (NHR) in his campaign against the rational acceptability of religious belief by discussing and rebutting some objections have been lodged to my previous presentations of my reading of the NHR. In earlier work I argued that the causal account of religious belief offered therein, if accepted as the best account, rationally destabilizes that belief. By this, I mean that acknowledging that the account is the best of the belief provides (...) a reason to suspend the belief unless and until some further epistemic justification is given for that belief. As such, the account leaves those who think that the belief can be given some epistemic justification unmoved, but has a particular force against the fideist who holds that justification is not required. In this paper I show in more detail than in previous work its relevance to a particular form of fideism, and rebut objections to my reading offered by Jennifer Marušic. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Richman and Read (eds.) _The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2000). The essay is highly critical of how the debate concerning whether Hume is a causal realist is presently conceived by its opponents, and argues in favour of a _New Hume position.

Without being narcissistic, the better part of Simone de Beauvoir's work is autobiographical. Autobiography, rather than any philosophy of history, is the basis on which Beauvoir renews the notion of history and places it at the core of feminist theory and politics.

George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge is a crucial text in the history of empiricism and in the history of philosophy more generally. Its central and seemingly astonishing claim is that the physical world cannot exist independently of the perceiving mind. The meaning of this claim, the powerful arguments in its favour, and the system in which it is embedded, are explained in a highly lucid and readable fashion and placed in their historical context. Berkeley's philosophy is, in part, a (...) response to the deep tensions and problems in the new philosophy of the early modern period and the reader is offered an account of this intellectual milieu. The book then follows the order and substance of the Principles whilst drawing on materials from Berkeley's other writings. This volume is the ideal introduction to Berkeley's Principles and will be of great interest to historians of philosophy in general. (shrink)

This paper examines the ramifications of Hume's view of the relation of conceivability to metaphysical possibility. It argues that the limitations Hume places of the representations involved in moves to conceivability to metaphysical possibility preclude any straightforward argument against full-blooded causal realism in Hume from conceivability. Furthermore, our finding certain states of affairs conceivable when they are not metaphysically possible is perfectly compatible with the thrust of the causal realist position.

David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely (...) complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that combine to yield a self and so on. (shrink)

This paper discusses a number of different aspects of Moore’s reading of Hume as engaged in the metaphysics of ‘sense-making’. After a brief discussion of the semantic strains, I turn to consider Moore’s views of Hume on epistemic ‘sense-making’ where I criticize Moore’s reading of Hume’s epistemology as assimilated to the more basic natural process of human beings. I consider some of the ways in which Moore thinks that Hume is involved in a positive metaphysical project.

I am extremely grateful to all my commentators for their very careful engagement with my book.1 Some disagreements, I think, may stem from my failure to be sufficiently clear and so are only apparent. Other objections are not and seem to be spot on. I will not be able to give fully adequate answers to all the objections, since some require sustained discussion of some very fundamental issues that is simply impossible in this forum.Schliesser's comments concern my discussion of philosophical (...) and natural relations and their connection with reason, and my reading of Hume's attitude regarding the external world.In my reading of "reason" in Hume I make some abstract distinctions. We can think of reason as a. (shrink)

The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. Citation: Kail, P. J. E. . 'Naturalism, method and genealogy in Beyond Selflessness', European Journal of Philosophy, 17, 113-120. Copyright © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

He is the darling of naturalism or the bogeyman of scepticism, a friend to virtue or an unwitting party to incipient nihilism. He is politically conservative, or a liberator from old views. He is a fideist, an advocate of faith over reason, or a precursor of Richard Dawkins.

This paper discusses some key connections between Berkeley's reflections on language in the introduction to his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge and the doctrines espoused in the body of that work, in particular his views on vulgar causal discourse and his response to the objection that his metaphysics imputes massive error to ordinary thought. I argue also that there is some mileage in the view that Berkeley's thought might be an early form of non-cognitivism.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Life and Works The New Theory About Light and Colours, Method and the Mechanical Philosophy Hypotheses Non Fingo, Gravity and the Mechanical Philosophy God, Activity and Space Absolute Space and Time Reactions to Newton.

This article analyses the conception of virtue and vice in early modern Europe. It explains that there were two movements in conceptions of virtue during this period. The first is the Cartesian tradition wherein virtue is intimately related to the control of the passions and the other is the continuation of this theme in Britain in a more aesthetic version. This article describes how the concepts of virtue and vice were softened by an awakening interest in the social emotions and (...) in the relationship between moral goodness and happiness. (shrink)

Questo articolo propone una riflessione sugli avvenimenti politici del '68 e del movimento femminista in Francia a partire da un'analisi del materialismo antinaturalista sartriano.

Traditionally Hume is seen as offering an ‘empiricist’ critique of ‘rationalism’. This view is often illustrated – or rejected – by comparing Hume's views with those of Descartes'. However the textual evidence shows that Hume's most sustained engagement with a canonical ‘rationalist’ is with Nicolas Malebranche. The author shows that the fundamental differences (among the many similarities) between the two on the self and causal power do indeed rest on a principled distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, and that there is (...) some truth in the traditional story. This, however, is very far from saying that Hume's general orientation is an attack on something called ‘rationalism’. (shrink)

In his contribution, the author discusses the deep and surprising similarities between the philosophies of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. The author argues that these stem from their shared conception of naturalism. Their naturalism is primarily an explanatory one and primarily aimed at explaining human thought and practice. In Nietzsche, this form of naturalism is expressed in his adoption of a genealogical approach to various topics, most famously that of morality. The author shows that Hume’s naturalism is similarly genealogical. The (...) author also argues that their conceptions of morality and the self are closer than popular images of the two philosophers might have it. (shrink)