Hume Studies

Hume on Self-Government and Strength of Mind

2024-04-01T19:13:57-04:00

Hume thought of mental tranquility as an ideal state, which he referred to as “Strength of Mind.” Someone who achieves this state, on Hume’s view, will be motivated by the calm rather than violent passions, and they will be able to resist the natural human tendency to overvalue the present. Contrary to his intellectual forebears, Hume did not believe one could develop strength of mind through personal philosophical reflection, but his rejection of this internalist position should not be taken as evidence that he believed one could only increase the prevalence of calm passions through external means such as the imposition of government or the sympathetic pressures of one’s community. Rather, there is room in Hume’s corpus for self-government and the individual cultivation of strength of mind. The key to success lies in adopting an objective stance towards one’s development and exerting agency over the process of habit formation. In its most sophisticated form, the project of developing strength of mind is, in Hume’s view, one of cultivating a transformative connoisseurship. A person engaged in this pursuit must develop a sensitivity to patterns of ideas and impressions that link motivating passions to pains and pleasures. Seeing over and over with more clarity how calm passions pattern with distant but greater pleasures increases the associations between the corresponding impressions and ideas, augmenting the vividness of the calm passions and thereby their strength and prevalence in the mind.

"Hume's Notorious Doctrine:" Pleasure, Virtue, and Natural Abilities

2024-04-01T19:13:57-04:00

This paper examines the roles of pleasure (and pain) in Hume’s ethics. Having elucidated Hume’s view of pleasure as an impression of sensation, and as prior to desire, the paper argues that Hume is best seen as both a ‘predominant’ psychological hedonist’ and an evaluative hedonist. It is then explained how pleasure features both in Hume’s metaethical account of virtue, and at the first-order level as a criterion of virtue, and how that criterion lies behind Hume’s important and somewhat neglected discussions of virtue and natural abilities at the close of both the Treatise and the moral Enquiry. The paper ends with a challenge to the very notion of ‘moral value’, based on these discussions.

Hume’s Pluralist Account of the Motives for Justice

2024-04-01T19:13:57-04:00

Philosophers disagree on the role of motivation in Hume’s account of justice in the Treatise. Garrett and Sayre-McCord argue that we can point to an approved motive which renders justice a virtue on Hume’s account of the virtues, while Harris argues that Hume specifics no such motive because he thinks justice is approved of for its consequences and thus is not a virtue. I argue that both views both of these interpretations unduly narrow Hume’s account of justice, and that Hume’s explanatory project leads him to conclude that there is both a virtue of justice motivated by an approved motive and that we approve of actions of justice independently of this motive. I show that Hume maintains an interest in the various motives for justice, and argue that this interest indicates that Hume’s artificial virtues are distinguished from the natural ones not only by their genetic story and system but also by their dependence on general compliance achieved by the approval of actions motivated by various motives.

God or Lack Thereof: On Humean Theism, Deism, Fideism, Agnosticism, and Atheism

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00

This paper defends a rigorous reading of Hume’s critiques of arguments for the existence of God and of the belief in God against interpretations that endorse Humean theism, deism, and fideism. These include Donald Livingston’s theist reading, J. C. A. Gaskin’s “attenuated deism” reading, and Edward Kanterian’s “humble fideism” reading. I also examine whether Hume’s rejections of a positive theology commit him to agnosticism or atheism. My innovative challenge to such conclusions maintains that, while elements of both agnosticism and atheism are found in Hume, these denote, respectively, a methodology and an incidental implication of his philosophy. But neither captures the constructive side of his vision for naturalist beliefs and ideals to guide our thought, conduct, and societies beyond simple atheism, and therefore advocates an alternate positive conception of Hume’s philosophy of religion.

Hume as Regularity Theorist - After All!

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00

Traditionally, Hume has widely been viewed as the standard-bearer for regularity accounts of causation. But between 1983 and 1990, two rival interpretations appeared – namely the sceptical realism of Wright, Craig, and Strawson, and the quasi-realist projectivism of Blackburn – and since then the interpretative debate has been dominated by the contest between these three approaches, with projectivism recently appearing the likely winner. This paper argues that the controversy arose from a fundamental mistake, namely, the assumption that Hume is committed to the subjectivity of our conception of causal necessity. The paper explains how that assumption generated tensions within the regularity account, which the sceptical realist and quasi-realist alternatives, in very different ways, purported to resolve. But a broader and more balanced view of the textual evidence, taking due account of the relatively neglected sections where Hume applies the results of his analysis, tells strongly in favour of an objectivist regularity view, both in respect of causation and causal necessity. Despite some complications, the upshot is a far more straightforward reading of Hume than those that have hitherto dominated this long-running debate.

review of Sakamoto, David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00

Pete review of Slavov

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00

Watkins' review of Milnes

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00

review of Radkova

2024-04-01T19:13:58-04:00