Peter Millican

Hume, Don Garrett’s new book—long anticipated and well worth the wait—is a tour de force. Garrett’s impressive ability to weave a coherent philosophical account of Hume’s ideas, even when they seem most muddled or contradictory, is here fully displayed, linking together Hume’s thought as a whole and finding systematic themes within it whose potential richness has escaped other commentators. As a great admirer of Garrett’s work, from which I have learned so much over the years, I found it fascinating to see how his overall interpretation of Hume pulls together a variety of strands that are by now very familiar to me, but whose potential close interconnections I had not fully appreciated. Although the book...

Yujin Nagasawa accuses me of attributing to Anselm a principle (the 'principle of the superiority of existence', or PSE) which is not present in his text and which weakens, rather than strengthens, his Ontological Argument. I am undogmatic about the interpretative issue, but insist on a philosophical point: that Nagasawa's rejection of PSE does not help the argument, and appears to do so only because he overlooks the same ambiguity that vitiates the original. My conclusion therefore remains: that the fatal flaw in Anselm's argument—as in many other variants—is a relatively shallow ambiguity rather than a deep metaphysical mistake

Hume’s view of reason is notoriously hard to pin down, not least because of the apparently contradictory positions which he appears to adopt in different places. The problem is perhaps most clear in his writings concerning induction - in his famous argument of Treatise I iii 6 and Enquiry IV, on the one hand, he seems to conclude that “probable inference” has no rational basis, while elsewhere, for example in much of his writing on natural theology, he seems happy to acknowledge that such inference is not only reasonable, but is even a paradigm of reasoning against which the theistic arguments must be judged. In the face of this apparent contradiction, many recent commentators have proferred “non-sceptical” interpretations of Hume’s argument concerning induction, but in this paper I sketch an alternative and perhaps less radical method of resolving the problem, by identifying a major threefold ambiguity in Hume’s use of the word “reason”. On this interpretation, Hume indeed sees induction as a paradigm of reasonableness in what is arguably the most important sense, but he nevertheless believes induction to be entirely non-reasonable in another sense, which though less important in common life is nevertheless very significant philosophically. A comparison with Locke can help to illuminate Hume’s position, which though indeed not entirely sceptical about induction, is by no means entirely non-sceptical either.

The overall aim of this thesis is to understand Hume’s famous argument concerning induction, and to appraise its success in establishing its conclusion. The thesis accordingly falls into two main parts, the first being concerned with analysis and interpretation of the argument itself, and the second with investigation of possible responses to it. Naturally the argument’s interpretation strongly constrains the range of possible replies, and indeed the results of Part I indicate that the only kind of strategy which stands much prospect of defeating Hume’s argument is one based on a priori probabilistic reasoning – hence the overwhelming majority of Part II is devoted to a thorough investigation of this approach.

David Hume has traditionally been assumed to be a soft determinist or compatibilist, at least in the ‘reconciling project’ that he presents in Section 8 of the first Enquiry, entitled ‘Of liberty and necessity.’ Indeed, in encyclopedias and textbooks of Philosophy he is standardly taken to be one of the paradigm compatibilists, rivalled in significance only by Hobbes within the tradition passed down through Locke, Mill, Schlick and Ayer to recent writers such as Dennett and Frankfurt. Many Hume scholars also concur in viewing him as a determinist, for example Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, A. J. Ayer, Paul Russell Don Garrett, Terence Penelhum, George Botterill, John Bricke, and John Wright. My main purpose in this paper will be to provide the evidence to substantiate this traditional interpretation, which has hitherto been widely assumed rather than defended. In the absence of such a defence, the consensus has been left open to challenge, most notably in a recent paper and a subsequent book by James Harris, who boldly claims that Hume ‘does not subscribe to determinism of any kind, whether Hobbesian or merely nomological.’

The centrepiece of Earman’s provocatively titled book Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles is a probabilistic interpretation of Hume’s famous ‘maxim’ concerning the credibility of miracle reports, followed by a trenchant critique of the maxim when thus interpreted. He argues that the first part of this maxim, once its obscurity is removed, is simply trivial, while the second part is nonsensical. His subsequent discussion culminates with a forthright challenge to any would-be defender of Hume to ‘point to some thesis which is both philosophically interesting and which Hume has made plausible’. My main aim here is to answer this challenge, by demonstrating a preferable interpretation of Hume’s maxim, according to which its first half is both plausible and non-trivial, while its second half sketches a useful, albeit approximate, corollary. I conclude by contesting Earman’s negative views on the originality and philosophical significance of Hume’s justly famous essay

The ‘New Hume’ interpretation, which sees Hume as a realist about ‘thick’ Causal powers, has been largely motivated by his evident commitment to causal language and causal science. In this, however, it is fundamentally misguided, failing to recognise how Hume exploits his anti-realist conclusions about (upper-case) Causation precisely to support (lower-case) causal science. When critically examined, none of the standard New Humean arguments — familiar from the work of Wright, Craig, Strawson, Buckle, Kail, and others — retains any significant force against the plain evidence of Hume's; texts. But the most devastating objection comes from Hume's own applications of his analysis of causation, to the questions of ‘the immateriality of the soul’ and ‘liberty and necessity’. These show that the New Hume interpretation has misunderstood the entire purpose of his ‘Chief Argument’, and presented him as advocating some of the very positions he is arguing most strongly against

I advance what might be thought a paradoxical thesis: that the central topic of Hume’s long discussions “Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion” is not, in fact, the idea of necessary connexion. However it is not as paradoxical as it first appears, for I shall claim that the “idea” whose origin Hume seeks is, in a sense, an idea-type of which the specific idea of necessary connexion is but one instance. Various lines of evidence support this claim, but my main argument will rest on its ability to solve four puzzles in Hume’s text, which are otherwise hard to explain away. These are: (S) the synonymy puzzle, posed by Hume’s apparently reckless assertion that “efficacy”, “agency”, “power”, “force”, “energy”, “necessity”, “connexion”, and “productive quality” are all virtual synonyms; (C) the complexity puzzle, that Hume seems to ignore the possibility that his target idea might be complex rather than simple; (V) the vulgar problem, which arises from Hume’s acknowledgement that the vulgar believe in “chancy” causes, even though he takes the very concept of causation to involve necessity; and (P) the probability problem, of how an allegedly simply idea whose central core involves inexorable necessity could possibly provide a basis for probability. The paper ends by drawing further support from an analysis of Hume’s two sections “Of the idea of necessary connexion”, showing that his use of the various relevant terms makes good sense on the thesis proposed, thus corroborating the arguments presented.

This is the second of two volumes of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing; it celebrates his intellectual legacy within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. A distinguished international cast of contributors focus on the relationship beteen a scientific, computational image of the mind and a common-sense picture of the mind as an inner arena populated by concepts, beliefs, intentions, and qualia. Topics covered include the causal potency of folk- psychological states, the connectionist reconception of learning and concept formation, the understanding of the notion of computation itself, and the relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts.

In October 1775, David Hume wrote to his printer William Strahan, requesting that an ‘Advertisement’ should be attached to remaining copies of the second volume of his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. This volume contained his two Enquiries, the Dissertation on the Passions, and The Natural History of Religion, and the Advertisement states that these works should ‘alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’ (E 2). In the covering letter, Hume comments that this ‘is a compleat Answer to Dr Reid and to that bigotted silly Fellow, Beattie.’ (HL ii. 301). My aim here is to try to throw light on what Hume might have meant by this comment, and to assess to what extent it might have been justified.

As a particular enthusiast for the first Enquiry, Hume’s definitive presentation of his epistemology and metaphysics ☺, I eagerly awaited the new Oxford editions for many years (from when they were initially announced under the aegis of Princeton). Although the Selby- Bigge edition of the Enquiries has done good service, most notably in its role of providing a widely agreed convention for references to Hume’s texts, I have always found it a bit strange that it should be generally thought of as a relatively reliable edition - if this is so, then I think it says more about the competition than it does about the Selby-Bigge edition itself. For example.