Society News
Ruth Weintraub's monograph, Humean Bodies and their Consequences, now released
We are delighted to note the publication of Ruth Weinbraub's monograph,
Here is the abstract: This book, published by Springer in February, 2024, defends the very contentious Idealist interpretation of Hume on external objects, and draws from it far-reaching consequences for Hume’s philosophy. Its interest is both interpretive and analytic. The content Hume ascribes to the belief in “bodies” is susceptible to more than one reading, and has not been systematically considered. Upholding the Idealistic interpretation is interesting in its own right, but also yields several important conclusions about the spatiality of objects, causation, Hume’s “science of man” and his epistemology. For instance, it argues that the Idealist reading means that there are no cross-temporal spatial relationships, and that the (more prevalent) Materialist reading takes Hume further away from methodological empiricism than does the Idealist counterpart, and may render his practice less in conformity with his official methodology.