Peter Millican

Peter Millican je profesor filosofie a Gilbert Ryle Fellow na Hertford College, University of Oxford. Věnuje se především epistemologii, filosofii jazyka a náboženství, zabývá se dílem Davida Huma a Alana Turinga. Je autorem více než padesáti časopisecky publikovaných studií, editoval sborníky The Legacy of Alan Turing (Oxford University Press, 1996) a Reading Hume on Human Understanding (Oxford University Press, 2002). Připravil kritické vydání Humova An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding v edici Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press, 2008) a spravuje internetový archiv Humových textů na Hume Texts Online. Rozhovor, který se odehrál v létě roku 2016, poznámkami pod čarou opatřil překladatel.

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...

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.

Over a period of more than twenty years, Sybil Wolfram gave lectures at Oxford University on Philosophical Logic, a major component of most of the undergraduate degree programmes. She herself had been introduced to the subject by Peter Strawson, and saw herself as working very much within the Strawsonian tradition. Central to this tradition, which began with Strawson's seminal attack on Russell's theory of descriptions in ‘On Referring' (1950), is the distinction between a sentence and what is said by a sentence − Strawson initially called the latter a use of a sentence, and sometimes a proposition , but his most frequent term for what is said , which Wolfram consistently adopts, is the statement expressed.1 The force of the distinction is clearly illustrated in ‘On Referring', which uses it to undermine the common assumption that any sentence must be either true, or false, or meaningless. Russell had argued on this basis that a sentence such as ‘The King of France is bald' (which is clearly neither true nor meaningless) must be false, but Strawson points out that if we distinguish between the sentence itself and the statement that it expresses (on some occasion of use), we can quite easily combine the admission that the sentence is meaningful − for it can in appropriate circumstances be used to express true and false statements − with the claim that nevertheless if the circumstances are ‘inappropriate' (in particular, when there is no current King of France), the sentence can fail to express a statement that is either true or false. On this picture, therefore, it is sentences that are meaningful, but statements that are the primary bearers of truth.

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.

This is just one typical example of a class of arguments which are sometimes used to attack those (such as the author of this article) who presume to criticise philosophers with different views, or from different cultures, by "dogmatically" appealing to the principles of logic. There is, as we shall see, something very odd about this sort of argument, but it does have a certain superficial plausibility, and also an air of moral virtue through its spirit of generous open-mindedness. Who are we to criticise Plato, Descartes and the rest, for failing to live up to our limited Modern Western Logic? Our criticisms must be simply the result of narrow-minded bigotry, which prevents us from seeing that all standards are relative, and that the pretended "objectivity" of our logic is no more than a manifestation of our supreme cultural arrogance.

The word ‘induction’ is derived from Cicero’s ‘inductio’, itself a translation of Aristotle’s ‘epagôgê’. In its traditional sense this denotes the inference of general laws from particular instances, but within modern philosophy it has usually been understood in a related but broader sense, covering any non-demonstrative reasoning that is founded on experience. As such it encompasses reasoning from observed to unobserved, both inference of general laws and of further particular instances, but it excludes those cases of reasoning in which the conclusion is logically implied by the premises, such as induction by complete enumeration.

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

I’d like to start by thanking all those who’ve played a part in making this conference such a success, including all the readers who helped us decide which papers to include, Jane (McIntyre) who chaired the Reading Committee, and especially Tony (Pitson), who organized the splendid local arrangements here in Stirling. Compared to Jane and Tony, I’ve had it relatively easy. Though I proposed, back at Lancaster in 1989, that this year’s conference should be mainly focused on the first Enquiry on its 250th anniversary, and originally planned to host it in Leeds, the last few years have been so horrendously busy and stressful for me that I would have found it very hard to cope as local organizer. Even without these strains, I would not have succeeded in doing things in Tony’s calm, efficient manner.

This companion to the study of one of the great works of Western philosophy--David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748)--provides a general overview of the Enquiry, especially for those approaching it for the first time, and sets it in the context of Hume's philosophical work as a whole. It elucidates, analyzes, and assesses the philosophy of the Enquiry, clarifying its interpretation and discussing recent developments in Hume scholarship that are relevant to the Enquiry. The eminent contributors to this volume cover a broad range of topics: meaning, induction, skepticism, belief, personal identity, causation, freedom, miracles, probability, and religious belief.

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.’