Hume Studies

Recent commentators have contended that Hume’s skeptical arguments in the Treatise lead him to eschew a traditional epistemic account of justification in favor of a pragmatic account. While this view resolves some textual puzzles, others arise. Instead, Hume should be read as endorsing two completely distinct standards of doxastic normativity: the epistemic and the pragmatic. The epistemic grants beliefs philosophical approval, while the pragmatic circumscribes the domain of investigation to prevent reasoning that leads to extreme skepticism. I argue that the mixed account of justification makes better sense of key passages in the Treatise than either constituent can on its own. One notable virtue of this account is that it explains how Hume can hold that the vulgar can have all things considered warrant.

Given the difficulty of characterizing the quandary introduced in Hume’s Appendix to the Treatise, coupled with the alleged “underdetermination” of the text, it is striking how few commentators have considered whether Hume addresses and/or redresses the problem after 1740—in the first Enquiry, for example. This is not only unfortunate, but ironic; for, in the Appendix, Hume mentions that more mature reasonings may reconcile whatever contradiction(s) he has in mind. I argue that Hume’s 1746 letter to Lord Kames foreshadows a subtle, but significant, shift in Hume’s reasonings regarding the relevance of “real connexions”; that the Enquiry of 1748 provides evidence for this shift; and that this shift obviates Hume’s second thoughts by reconciling the contradiction that he had in mind. In short, Hume’s letter to Kames and Enquiry supply the retrodictive keys to a systematically satisfactory account.

This essay argues for a new Hume attribution. It does so by pursuing an endnote—related to the Rev. Thomas Percy’s The Regulations and Establishment of the Household of Henry Algernon Percy, the Fifth Earl of Northumberland—that Hume added to the 1773 edition of his History of England. Establishing the contexts of Hume’s elaborate endnote—including his later revisions to it and his correspondence with Percy, Adam Smith, William Strahan, and others—leads us to an anonymous book review of Percy’s volume, published in Gilbert Stuart’s Edinburgh Magazine and Review. If the argument presented here is right, that review is Hume’s. Appearing in January 1774, it is also the last known book review that Hume published.

The following article provides a number of additions to Further Letters of David Hume, the supplementary edition of Hume’s letters and manuscripts published by the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society in 2014. The article is intended as a provisional resource for scholars who are awaiting a complete Correspondence of David Hume, scheduled for appearance with the Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume (Oxford University Press), and it includes several unknown Hume letters and manuscripts which were either inadvertently omitted from Further Letters of David Hume or discovered in the period since its publication.

In this paper, I argue that Hume’s response to his skeptical problem is purely practical. First, I argue that Hume’s terminology of “philosophy” is the textual key to identifying his evaluations of beliefs from that standpoint which is normative for the sciences. Second, I reexamine the crisis of Treatise 1.4.7 (SBN 263–274) in the light of “philosophy.” Hume faces a “life-or-philosophy” dilemma: due to his skeptical arguments, practically indispensable core be­liefs of common life and science are not philosophically acceptable. The Title Principle is not a philosophical norm but rather subordinates philosophical norms to practical interests. Third, I explain Hume’s practical justification for a moderate pursuit of philosophy. He has purely practical reasons for ignoring the skeptical demands of philosophy, and purely practical reasons for follow­ing philosophy in his constructive scientific research.

The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the understanding of Hume’s account of the faculty of reason and to examine some implica­tions for interpreting the broader arc of his philosophy. I argue that Hume develops his thinking about reason dialectically in Book 1 of the Treatise by creating a reflective dynamic between two different concepts of reason. The first concept of reason (reason1) is a narrow faculty that operates on ideas via intuition and demonstration. The second concept (reason2) is a broader imagination-dependent faculty that augments reason1 with the activity of probable reasoning. The dialectic between reason1 and reason2 leads Hume to skepticism, which is compounded by the fact that reason2 self-subverts if not constrained. Hume resolves these matters in the conclusion to Book 1 by conditionally committing to apply reason2 to matters of common life and social interest in a diffidently skeptical manner.

Reid’s dilemma concludes that, whether the idea associated with a denied proposition is lively or faint, Hume is committed to saying that it is either believed or merely conceived. In neither case would there be denial. If so, then Hume cannot give an adequate account of denial. I consider and reject Powell’s suggestion that Hume could have advanced a “Content Con­trary” account of denial that avoids Reid’s dilemma. However, not only would a Humean Content Contrary account be viciously circular, textual evidence suggests that Hume did not hold such an account. I then argue that Govier’s distinction between force and vivacity cannot help Hume. Not only did Hume fail to recognize this distinction, we can advance a variant of Reid’s dilemma even if we distinguish force from vivacity.

Hume refers to women as imaginative, compassionate, conversable, and delicate. While his appraisals of women seem disparate, I argue that they reflect a position about the distinctive role that Hume takes women to have in shaping and enforcing moral norms. On his view, I maintain, women provide us with the ideal model of a moral judge. I claim that Hume sees a tight con­nection between moral competency and those traits he identifies as feminine. Making this case requires clarifying a few concepts in Hume’s philosophical toolbox and their relation to one another. The primary quality of a good moral judge, according to Hume, is a delicacy of taste. I show that Hume thinks of delicacy as a feminine skill that can only be developed in men imperfectly, thereby making women the ideal moral judges.

The relation between Hume’s constructive and skeptical aims has been a central concern for Hume interpreters. Hume’s two definitions of ‘cause’ in the Treatise and first Enquiry apparently represent an important constructive achievement, but this paper argues that the definitions must be understood in terms of Hume’s skepticism. The puzzle I address is simply that Hume gives two definitions rather than one. I use Don Garrett’s interpretation as a foil to develop my alternative skeptical interpretation. Garrett claims the definitions exhibit a general susceptibility to two kinds of definition that all “sense-based concepts” share. Against Garrett, I argue that the definitions express an imperfection Hume finds only in our concept of causation. That imperfection is absent from other sense-based concepts, and prompts skeptical sentiments in Hume’s conclusion to the Treatise’s Book 1. I close by comparing my interpretation with those of Helen Beebee, Stephen Buckle, Galen Strawson and Paul Russell.

This essay examines the content, context and relevance of Hume’s characterization of the human condition in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as “whimsical.” According to Hume, human beings are by nature both theoretical and practical beings and the whimsical condition is an instability generated by both theory and practice. It is the fact that by nature human beings must and do act, reason and believe with assurance and conviction, but are unable to satisfy their natural desire to justify their assurances and convictions. On Hume’s account, this skepticism is cancelled neither by theoretical reflection nor human practice. Finally, Hume’s text suggests that human beings suffer the “whimsical condition of mankind” not only collectively, but that it is a condition human beings experience individually, including dogmatic reasoners.

This paper assesses Hume’s theory of belief by considering a puzzle about the nature of counterfeit belief. Counterfeit beliefs include states brought on by poetry, which possess the same phenomenological properties as beliefs but still fail to count as beliefs (T 1.3.10.10; SBN 630–31). I argue that a dispositional interpretation can give an account of the difference between belief and counterfeit belief, but most common versions of the occurrent state view cannot. Nonetheless, I argue that the occurrent state view can be revised to accommodate the problem of counterfeit belief. On my version of the occurrent state interpretation, beliefs are lively ideas—that is, occurrent states—that are related to a present impression in an appropriate way. Because counterfeit beliefs are not appropriately related to a present impression, they do not count as beliefs.

The standard interpretation of the impression of will takes Hume to advance two substantive claims about the experience of willing an act. The first claim holds that this experience is readily introspectible; the second that this experience is strictly antecedent to the performance of an act. This interpretation has rendered the impression of will vulnerable to two lines of criticism. One problem is introspective. We are not normally aware of a distinct experience of willing an act. Another problem is temporal. It is odd to think that the experience of volition is something that occurs in its entirety prior to the performance of an act. I argue that the standard interpretation, which burdens Hume with an implausible view of the experience of willing an act, imports claims for which there is insufficient textual evidence and which are not required by his theoretical commitments.

Given the importance of sympathetic pleasures within Hume’s account of approval and moral motivation, why does Hume think we feel obliged to act justly on those occasions when we know that doing so will benefit nobody? I argue that Hume uses the case of justice as evidence for a key claim regarding all virtues. Hume does not think we approve of token virtuous actions, whether natural or artificial, because they cause or aim to cause happiness in others. It is sufficient for the action to be of a type which has “a tendency to the public good” for us to feel approval of it, and to be motivated to perform it. Once we are aware that just actions tend to cause happiness, we approve of all just actions, even token actions which cause more unhappiness than happiness.