Hume's Account Research Articles

Shepherd's social epistemology: A nonreductive theory of testimony and the question of epistemic autonomy

AbstractIn this article, I extract Mary Shepherd's social epistemology primarily from her attack on Hume's dismissive account of miracle reports. On my reading, she adopts a nonreductionist position on testimony, arguing that the hearer is both caused and justified to regard testimonies as true by default, that is, in the absence of any undefeated defeater. In contrast to Humean reductionism, we do not need to provide positive evidence for the truth of the testified proposition, for instance, by appealing to the observed reliability of the speaker or speakers generally. In fleshing out her account, I clarify why her nonreductionism does not lead Shepherd to question our epistemic autonomy—the idea that we are supposed to draw our own conclusions. Indeed, I argue that it is precisely her commitment to epistemic autonomy that explains why, despite following Reid's similar account of testimony, she emphatically denies that we could justify metaphysical principles by appealing to common sense or universal agreement among people. Relatedly, I suggest that Shepherd thinks that while we have an a priori right to trust testimonies about events (whether ordinary or extraordinary) that we have not witnessed ourselves, we should never base our philosophical judgments simply on others' authority.

Resonating strings: understanding the transition from Hume’s Treatise to Second Enquiry

ABSTRACT What, if anything, changes between Hume's moral theory as presented in the Treatise of Human Nature and then in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals? This question has received increased attention, especially focused on Hume's presentation of sympathy and humanity, and the connection of those principles to Hume's account of moral sentiments. While there is a strong consensus that Hume is making important stylistic changes to the presentation of his views, scholars are divided on the question of whether there are also substantive changes to the views. This paper sides with those who hold that there are substantive changes, offering new evidence for that position. I argue that Hume revised his Treatise account of sympathy to better accommodate cases of affective difference and incapacity. After presenting these cases, I show that Hume's Treatise account of the sympathy mechanism and its role in the production of moral sentiments is more seriously threatened by the problem of affective difference and incapacity than the corresponding account in the second Enquiry. This gives us persuasive evidence in support of the interpretations that hold that there are substantive changes in the second Enquiry, while also helping to explain Hume's motivation for such changes.

“A male feminist walks into a bar, because it was set so low: The pedestal effect and the economy of gratitude in feminist spaces”

AbstractMen in feminist spaces often find themselves the recipients of disproportionate gratitude and attention—along with other persistent effects of male privilege that I have elsewhere termed the Pedestal Effect—despite this running counter to both prevailing feminist ideologies and the desires of the men themselves. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild described a similar economy of gratitude wherein low expectations led to heightened valuation of married men's household contributions, smuggling inequities from the wider society into the marriage and inhibiting progressive change even if both parties desired a more egalitarian partnership. By applying Hochschild's framework to interview data from 52 men and 12 women active in the field, I show that the same process explains the troubling continuance of male privilege in feminist spaces: while interviewees of all genders problematize the imbalanced economy of gratitude and many have attempted specific counterstrategies, it nonetheless persists in importing inequalities, undermining men's accountability, and inhibiting desired progressive change. This suggests that the economy of gratitude may be a ubiquitous interactional process that reproduces inequalities across a wide range of social contexts. I emphasize that the economy of gratitude is in fact intersectional, not only gendered, and introduce the idea of a “low bar” to more fully account for the broad range of social influences on expectation‐setting.

Smithian Moral Judgement: Humean Passions and Beyond

Smithian (supposedly) irregular feelings reveal the internal structure of moral judgements by showing that they consist of two distinct elements. These elements belong to different dynamisms of human nature, are triggered by different causes, and produce different reactions in the agent. In the case of resentment, I call them animal resentment and moral resentment, respectively. Animal resentment closely resembles Hume's account of resentment and follows his theory of the passions. Moral resentment is different, for it is not caused directly by pain, but by the recognition of the evil intention of the aggressor. Finally, plain moral resentment – or resentment caused by an unjust action and approved of by the impartial spectator – blends these elements into a unity articulated by Hume’s theory of the passions.

Going ‘Humean’ on the Flow of Time

Abstract We argue that the problem of the flow of time is a special problem, one unlike many other challenges in reconciling temporal phenomena with time in physics. After clarifying this point, we develop a Humean account of the flow of time according to which the psychological stream of experience explains why we think the world is tensed. On our account, the flow of time is not all inferential, as the invitation to think time flows comes from the deepest aspects of human experience, making it an offer we cannot refuse.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Time

If you were to list the perennial issues in philosophy, the nature of time would no doubt be on that list. The essays in the present volume all touch upon the problem of time. The volume includes four contributions from different perspectives within the history of philosophy of time.Jani Hakkarainen and Todd Ryan delve into David Hume's account of time. Hume thinks there can be no time without succession. Consequently, unchanging, steadfast objects do not have a duration. They are stationary, not subject to any change. Although they lack a duration, they coexist with a temporal succession. This introduces a problem: What is the relation between unchanging objects and time? Hakkarainen and Ryan draw on what they call Hume's Principle of Quantitative Comparison. Each indivisible temporal extent is equal to any other temporal extent; differences in duration are due to the different number of temporal parts. Steadfast objects may be thought to undergo a certain number of calculable changes when they are compared to ordinary successions we experience. This experience is provided, for example, by the ticking of a clock. We have the capacity to think that steadfast objects have precise durations. We humans nevertheless cannot give any deep explanation as how we come to this conclusion.Emily Thomas focuses on the graphic representation of time. Whereas the visual representation of time has typically been done with matrices or grids, Joseph Priestley represented time in a line in 1765. Priestley's line divides time “by an equal scale” into centuries. Many have interpreted this as being evidence of a Newtonian influence, as if there is an absolute time flowing equably. Thomas situates Priestley's position in the modern debates on the nature of our ideas. She argues that the absolutist reading does not have merit. Thomas thinks rather that Priestley sides with David Hartley, who explained how we acquire the ideas of duration and time from sensation. Thomas's essay advances our understanding of the history of space-time parallelism. With timelines, the analogy between time and space becomes a possibility.In my essay I assess Ernst Mach's criticism of Isaac Newton's substantivalist account of time. Newton's argument for absolute time relates to his mathematical-empirical physics and theology. In his Science of Mechanics, Mach largely neglects the laws of motion, calculus and the omnipresence theology that is at the background of Newton's concept of time. Mach did however criticize Newton's absolutist argument on the basis that the self-existing flow cannot be observed, measured, or experimented with, and he provided an alternative relational account of time. I point out that this was not only extreme positivism or phenomenalism, but an epistemology and ontology suited for the subsequent physical theories of relativity. Finally, I argue that Mach's denial of the independent atomic structure of matter should not be entirely assimilated to his denial of substantivalism about time. The two phenomena are different, so we should evaluate Mach's reasoning concerning them accordingly.Matyáš Moravec and Peter West go through Susan Stebbing's criticism of Arthur Eddington's popular account of the passage of time. Stebbing's target, Moravec and West argue, is Eddington's largely Bergsonian view on time. She objects to the view that our minds have “a private door” to the physical reality which no measurements can disclose. Stebbing believes that our experience of the passage of time belongs to our ordinary, every-day experience, and she thinks Eddington mystifies the whole idea by leaning on a peculiar form of introspection. Moravec and West build a case for Bergson's influence on Eddington, arguing that Bergson probably did contribute to Eddington's idea of “the intuition of becoming.” Both seem to think that we may access the dynamic temporal reality in ways not captured by scientific investigation, by means of an introspective internal experience of duration.As a final remark, I think I should note, with regret, that out of the six authors in this volume only one is a woman. Let the reader know that as an editor I tried to strike a better balance. I still trust that the quality of the articles is high, and most importantly, worthwhile for readers interested in the history of philosophy of time.

Hume on Time and Steadfast Unchanging Objects

AbstractIn this paper we consider a puzzle concerning Hume's account of time and what he calls “steadfast unchanging objects”—that is, unchanging objects coexisting with temporal successions. On the one hand, Hume maintains that steadfast unchanging objects are temporally indivisible. On the other, he allows that such unchanging objects are capable of undergoing a determinate number of alterations in a given length of time, which seems to imply that they are at least potentially temporally divisible. After arguing that Donald Baxter's influential interpretation of Hume's theory of time cannot resolve this tension, we propose that Hume offers a skeptical resolution of the difficulty.

"I See Nothing Wrong with Stealthing in Anonymous Sexual Situations": Assemblages of Sexual Consent in Gay, Bisexual, and other Queer Men's Accounts of "Stealthing" in an Online Barebacking Forum

"I See Nothing Wrong with Stealthing in Anonymous Sexual Situations": Assemblages of Sexual Consent in Gay, Bisexual, and other Queer Men's Accounts of "Stealthing" in an Online Barebacking Forum

The Displaced Predicament: Allegory, Irony, and Remystification

This contribution reorients what Paul de Man calls "the human predicament" in his influential essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Colliding de Man's account of allegory and irony with paradigms articulated in Black Studies, it attempts to radicalize de Man's framework by questioning the implicit racial ontology in the "predicament" of self and language he outlines. Because de Man has proven so influential in Romantic Studies, I suggest, by way of a brief reading of Phillis Wheatley alongside Wordsworth, that this reorientation of de Man has implications for a much broader reorientation of Romanticism.

Demarcating the Social World with Hume

Where lies the boundary between the natural and social worlds? For the local constructionist, who wants to say that whilst global constructionism is false, nonetheless there remains a domain of socially constructed phenomena, there is going to be a demarcation question. In this paper I explore two initially plausible accounts of the boundary, based on mind-dependence and constructive mechanisms, and show that each is bound to fail. After further rejecting an explanatory account drawn from the work of Ásta, I look at Hume’s account of the artificial to develop a distinctly Humean account of the boundary, improving it with a necessity condition to deal with potentially pernicious counter-examples, and suggesting that it provides our best answer to the local constructionist’s demarcation question.

Governing Laws and the Inference Problem

Abstract How do non-Humean laws govern regularities in nature? According to the Inference Problem, non-Humean accounts of governing face a central problem: it is not clear how such laws do perform their governing function. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that the introduction of a law-to-regularity axiom is sufficient to solve the Inference Problem. The authors argue that Schaffer’s solution faces a devastating dilemma: either the required axiom cannot, on its own, differentiate the non-Humean account from a Humean account of laws or, if more content is added to the primitive governing posit, it should be shown how and why the ‘outfitted’ posit obtains in the world. Furthermore, the authors show that those cases that Schaffer presents to motivate his approach are not analogous to the case of lawhood and so they cannot provide justification for his axiomatic solution.

Hume and ‘The Progress of Reason’

In his Political Discourses, Hume's account of the gains from trade rested on a two-factor theory of prices, with an emphasis on long-run adjustments governed by factor mobility and price convergence. Hume's vision of global capitalism rested on the belief that financial instruments were increasingly untethered to nation states and that higher wages induced higher productivity. Hume's historical narrative underscored the importance of the Reformation for prompting the mass migration of skilled laborers, the gradual diminution of superstition, the elimination of what he called “profound ignorance,” and the spread of independent thought and literacy. For Hume, the modern commercial world was possible because of the gradual evolution of customs and habits, the increased prevalence of frugality, industry, and secular civility. He saw means-end rational behavior–“the progress of reason”–woven right through the modern commercial world. Britain, particularly since the Glorious Revolution, had in his view become the most enlightened and progressive nation yet known, with much potential for economic growth. In these respects, Hume was more closely aligned with the classical economists, Smith, Ricardo and J.S. Mill, than has hitherto been appreciated.

On the idea of intrinsic human worth

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the idea of intrinsic worth encompasses all human beings, no matter how they are circumstanced. This concept needs to be understood transcendentally, not prescriptively. These terms are explained, with particular reference to Kant. It also argues that discourses of identity and recognition can best be understood through the idea of human worth.  The paper suggests that human worth cannot be explicitly defined but needs to be expressed indirectly through signs and gestures. One way of doing this is through the invocation of sympathy and to this end a version of Hume's account of sympathy is presented. The paper concludes with some remarks as to how ‘human intrinsic worth’ might be incorporated into pedagogy.

Lupus Nephritis diagnosed by stand-alone renal histopathological findings in a middle-aged male.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a systemic autoimmune condition, characterized by the production of autoantibodies, predominantly against nuclear antigens. It primarily affects women of childbearing age. Men account for 4-22% of all cases in various series (1,2). Lupus nephritis can be diagnosed with high sensitivity and specificity based on histopathological criteria alone (3). We report lupus nephritis in a 50-year-old male diagnosed solely on renal histopathological findings.

Hume and the Guise of the Bad

In Treatise 2.3.4.5 Hume provides an explanation of why ‘we naturally desire what is forbid, and take a pleasure in performing actions, merely because they are unlawful’. Hume's explanation of this phenomenon has barely received any attention so far. But a detailed analysis bears fruit for both Humean scholarship and contemporary moral psychology. After putting the passage in its context, I explain why desiring and taking pleasure in performing certain actions merely because they are unlawful poses a challenge to Hume's theory of evaluation. Then I propose a solution of the challenge which draws on Hume's treatment of malice, and highlights the role played by comparison and the self in these apparently paradoxical passions. Finally, I distinguish three views in contemporary discussions of desiring something under the guise of the bad (negationism, parasitism, at-face-valuism), and I argue that Hume's account stands out as a particularly plausible version of the third view.

Hume's Account of the Scope of Justice

Hume's Account of the Scope of Justice

Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action by Constantine Sandis

Reviewed by: Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action by Constantine Sandis David Landy Constantine Sandis. Character and Causation: Hume's Philosophy of Action. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xiii +148. Cloth, $140.00. Constantine Sandis's suggestive new book consists of a series of discrete studies of aspects of Hume's philosophical system that culminate in an argument for the conclusion that "on Hume's view . . . we are only morally responsible for that subset of actions that have been motivated by our character traits" (90). That final conclusion is the end of a wide-ranging and systematic argument that feels too compressed in the scant one-hundred and twenty-three pages in which it is presented, especially since the philosophical and exegetical theses that Sandis presents along the way are intriguing and receive just enough support to make the reader long for a more robust consideration of them. Sandis's grand argument begins with the familiar approach of understanding Hume's Copy Principle as placing strict limits on the possible contents of our mental representations, thereby requiring Hume to revise our understanding of our own ideas. Sandis dubs this "soft conceptual revisionism" (2). In the early chapters of the book, the most important result that this approach yields is Hume's revision of our concept of necessary connection [End Page 406] to comprise only constant conjunction and temporal priority. The upshot of Sandis's discussion is to earn Hume a sense of 'necessity' and 'causation' that meets his criterion of meaningfulness and grounds the aforementioned account of action. Actions turn out to be those bodily movements with certain causes, properly construed, as either acts of will or character traits. Another important piece of Sandis's argument is his provocative claim that "a belief just is the feeling or sentiment accompanying an idea" (23), which "firm conception consists in feeling that something is the case" (24). At first blush, Sandis appears to make the radically heterodox claim that Hume holds that there is a distinct impression that is annexed to, accompanies, all believed ideas, despite the fact that Hume explicitly argues against that thesis (App 3–9/SBN 624–27). Upon closer inspection, however, Sandis denies the radical heterodoxy (24), and his actual claim is more anodyne. Despite his continued reference to belief as a sentiment or feeling, which terms Hume uses to denote distinct impressions (e.g. T 2.1.11.7/SBN 318–19 and T 1.1.1.1/SBN 1–2.), Sandis's actual claim appears to be that we should understand Hume's use of 'belief' to refer to the liveliness of these enlivened ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. What Sandis takes that nominalization to earn him is that beliefs, including moral beliefs, can produce action alone because they "are all sentiments" (99), and Hume is free to hold that we can be motivated directly by at least some of our beliefs, without the need for an additional conative perception. (In this sense, Sandis takes Hume to be non-Humean about motivation.) That is, Sandis holds that the liveliness of some of our ideas can itself be the cause (in the proper Humean sense) of some of our actions. That thesis is significant for Sandis insofar as discovering the cause of our actions brings to bear the question of the disappearing agent (78): if our actions have causes outside of our control, even if these causes are literally parts of us, then in what sense are we responsible for those actions? Sandis's answer on Hume's behalf is that while some actions are bodily movements caused by particular volitional perceptions (acts of will), we are only responsible for those actions that are also caused by manifestations of the long-term dispositions that constitute a person's character. In support of this answer, Sandis also advocates for a revisionist understanding of Hume's account of the self as a bundle of perceptions (chapter 4), an interpretation of Hume's notion of character as long-term behavioral dispositions (chapter 5), a rejection on Hume's behalf of what Sandis calls the Conflating View of Motivating Reasons—the thesis that the reasons for...

MIXED EMOTIONS IN LIFE AND ART: ON HUME'S DIRECT PASSIONS

AbstractThis article is about David Hume's account of mixed emotions. Hume on mixed emotions is connected with Sir Isaac Newton's optical experiments and subsequent invention of the colour wheel, as well as more recently to Robert Plutchik's colour wheel of emotions.

Humean laws and explanation

My primary focus in this paper is on an objection to Humean account of laws and specifically to David Lewis’ “best systems analysis” (BSA). The objection is that the laws according to the BSA (which I call L-laws) fail to account for the ability of laws to explain. In contrast governing laws (which I will call G-laws) are alleged to account for the role of laws in scientific explanations by virtue of their governing role. If governing is required for laws to be explanatory then Humean accounts like Lewis’ are dead in the water since explanation is central to the role of laws in the sciences. However, I will argue that there are effective rebuttals to arguments that Humean laws don’t explain and that actually it is governing accounts that have difficulty with explanation.

Are non-accidental regularities a cosmic coincidence? Revisiting a central threat to Humean laws

If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on many grounds ever since it was first proposed. In place of equiprobability, recent formal models represent the doxastic state of total ignorance as suspension of judgment. In this paper I revisit the cosmic coincidence objection to Humean laws by assessing which doxastic state we should endorse. By focusing on specific features of our scenario I conclude that suspending judgment results in an unnecessarily weak doxastic state. First, I point out that recent literature in epistemology has provided independent justifications of the principle of indifference. Second, given that the argument is framed within a Humean metaphysics, it turns out that we are warranted to appeal to these justifications and assign a uniform and additive credence distribution among Humean mosaics. This leads us to conclude that, contrary to widespread opinion, we should not dismiss the cosmic coincidence objection to the Humean account of laws.