Lorne Falkenstein

We asked our readers to answer the question, in 250 words or fewer, "Of all the articles that have been published in Hume Studies over the past 50 years, which one is most noteworthy to you? Why so?" We realized that what is noteworthy to individual scholars will vary by their research interests and many other factors. Here are the responses we received, ordered by the date of the Hume Studies articles chosen, from earliest to most recent.Saul Traiger, "Impressions, Ideas, and Fictions," Hume Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 381–99Hume argues that various mental states are "fictions" of the imagination. The ancient philosopher's commitment to material substance is a fiction, as are our ascriptions of diachronic identity... Read More.

David Hume’s philosophical work presents the reader with a perplexing mix of constructive accounts of empirically guided belief and destructive sceptical arguments against all belief. This book reconciles this conflict by showing that Hume intended his scepticism to be remedial. It immunizes us against the influence of “unphilosophical” causes of belief, determining us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence. In making this case, this book develops Humean positions on topics Hume did not discuss in detail but that are of interest to contemporary philosophers: consciousness and the unity of consciousness, temporal experience, visual spatial perception, the experience of colour and other qualia, objective experience, and spatially extended minds. It also challenges currently accepted interpretations of Hume’s views on the finite divisibility of space and time, vacuum, the duration of unchanging objects, and identity over time. It deals with criticisms of Hume that were raised by his contemporaries, notably by Thomas Reid, draws attention to earlier seventeenth‑ and eighteenth‑century work that has bearing on the interpretation of Hume’s thought, and compares Hume’s achievements with those of later nineteenth‑century psychologists and philosophers.

Rae Langton's main purpose in Kantian Humility is to uncover the reasons that led Kant to claim that we can have no knowledge of things in themselves. As part of this effort, she articulates and attempts to defend a novel and intriguing position on what things in themselves are for Kant, and what it means for him to deny knowledge of them. Though the presentation of these views is lucid and informed by selective citation from a range of Kant's works, the argument is flawed and the author's treatment of Kant is blinkered

Kant's problematic conclusion, that we can know that things in themselves are not in space or time, is shown to follow directly from his claim that space and time are manners of disposition or forms of arrangement in which various items are presented to us in intuition. This argument is not strong enough to rule out certain well-defined senses in which things in themselves "could" possibly be spatio-temporal, but it does show that any sense in which things in themselves could be in space or time would bear no relation to the spatio-temporal features of appearances.

This paper was originally published in _Journal of the History of Ideas_ 51 (1990): 573-597. Kant's claim that space and time are "forms of intuition" is contrasted with the nativist claim that space is an innate idea or construct of the mind and with the empiricist claim that space is given in or learned from experience. It is argued that the nativism/empiricism debate masks a more fundamental disagreement between sensationism and constructivism. Kant's account of space- and time-cognition is shown to be neither sensationist nor constructivist and as a consequence to be "nativistic" in a sense which commentators from Vaihinger and Kemp Smith to Patricia Kitcher have failed to capture.

(This article was republished in lightly re-edited form in _Journal of Scottish Philosophy_ 16 (2018) 175-91.) Reid and Berkeley disagreed over whether we directly perceive objects located outside of us in a surrounding space, commonly revealed by both vision and touch. Berkeley considered a successful account of erect vision to be crucial for deciding this dispute, at one point calling it ‘the principal point in the whole optic theory.’ Reid's critique of Berkeley's position on this topic is very brief, and appears to miss Berkeley's point. I argue that there is more to Reid's response to Berkeley than at first meets the eye. Reid's rival account of erect vision draws on evidence that makes a compelling case for the position that we see the same space that we touch.

Over _Principles_ 42-43, Berkeley worried that we might "in truth" see things existing at a distance from us, in which case they could not plausibly be supposed to exist independently of being perceived. He went on to say that he had developed his new theory of vision to address this worry. This paper argues that the worry is serious and that Berkeley was right to think that it would take nothing less than a theory of vision to address it. The paper further argues that Berkeley's theory of vision fails to adequately address the worry. The locus of the failure is Berkeley's account of what he called "situation." The term has an ambiguity that Berkeley exploited. It can refer to how coloured points are localized on a two dimensional visual field or it can mean how the visual field is oriented with respect to the direction of gravity. Berkeley focused on the second when he needed to explain how the first is possible without granting that we originally experience objects as disposed over at least two spatial dimensions.

This chapter examines what Hume and Reid had to say about what Reid called our intellectual powers: sensation, conception, perception, memory, abstraction, judgement, and reasoning. In the process it examines their opposed views on the nature of mind, on the representation of space and the spatiality of mental content, on temporal experience and the metaphysics of time, on the conception of non-existent objects, and on conceivability and possibility. The chapter critically examines what each had to say in his own defence and what Reid had to say in opposition to Hume, and conjectures what Hume might have said in response to Reid.

In Book 1, Part 2, Section 3 of his _Treatise of Human Nature_, David Hume argued that the idea of time arises from the experience of succession. In doing so, he raised a difficult question about the nature of that experience. The experience must be an experience had over time, not an experience of time. But how is that possible? This paper investigates how far mechanisms Hume appealed to when accounting for such related phenomena as causal inference, the understanding of abstract terms and the attribution of necessitating power to causes – habituation, the formation of expectations and the projection of feelings – can serve as a Humean way of defending Hume's account of temporal experience. In passing the paper questions the soundness of Hume's arguments for concluding that it is impossible to experience time without experiencing change.

This paper argues that Hume was first and foremost a moral psychologist and a determinist, not a moralist. When confronting the fact of moral disagreement, notably in "A Dialogue" affixed to his moral enquiry, he maintained that it is not psychologically possible to approve of the conflicting norms of other cultures, except in the case of sometimes approving of individuals in other cultures for abiding by those objectionable norms rather than fomenting cultural upheaval. All cultures should nonetheless agree on the most general and fundamental moral principles as well as on most specifics. But there are non-trivial specific cases on which there will be irreconcilable disagreements, based on conflicting beliefs concerning utilities, finer matters of taste, and uncertainties over how best to maximize conflicts between the useful/agreeable and the personal/social. In these cases, we would be wise to consider whether tolerating the conflicting views of others would be more useful and agreeable than attempting to enforce conformity. Toleration is among the less obvious virtues, but it is one that experience has by now taught us to adopt, at least in certain cases

Book 1, Part 4, Section 5 of Hume’s Treatise is taken up with a response to an argument for the immateriality of the soul that Hume considered “remarkable,” and that Kant was later to describes as the “Achilles” (the strongest) of all the arguments for this conclusion. This paper surveys versions of the argument offered by Cudworth, Bayle, and Clarke before going on to argue that Hume’s own treatment of the argument departs from the standard in a number of important ways. The departures restate the argument in Humean terms, replacing premises concerning inherence, substance, and action, which Hume considered to be false or unintelligible, with ones mentioning conjunction at a location in space, which he considered to be at least intelligible. These changes challenge the view that Treatise 1.4.5 was intended as a satire or a lampoon. A satire or lampoon exposes a flat statement of its target view to ridicule. It does not modify that view— certainly not by way of introducing improvements to make it more intelligible. Hume meant to endorse what he said in Treatise 1.4.5. In particular, he meant to endorse the tenets that that there are mental states that are spatially extended, and that it is as difficult to explain how an immaterial soul could contain extended mental images as to explain how a material soul could contain unextended thoughts.

Hume appears to have sometimes taken religion to be founded on reason, at other times to have taken it to be founded on faith, and at yet other times to be based on authority. All of these views can be found in the different pieces collected together in the second volume of his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. By means of an analysis of what Hume meant by "genuine religion," "true religion," and "rational religion," I uncover a consistent, sincere view that Hume sustained throughout his published works. This view is atheistic.

There are good reasons to think that at least a part of Hume's project in the ‘The natural history of religion’ was to buttress a philosophical critique of the reasonableness of religious belief undertaken in other works, and to attack a fundamentalist account of the history of religion and the foundations of morality. But there are also problems with supposing that Hume intended to achieve either of these goals. I argue that two problems in particular – accounting for Hume's neglect of revelation, and accounting for his remarks on the ‘invincibility’ of the reasons for ‘genuine theism’ – can only be resolved by recognizing that Hume's purposes in ‘The natural history’ were not fundamentally critical. If I am right, Hume's purpose was mainly to explain why ‘false’ or ‘adulterate’ forms of religious belief are so widespread and so influential.

Logic Works is a critical and extensive introduction to logic. It asks questions about why systems of logic are as they are, how they relate to ordinary language and ordinary reasoning, and what alternatives there might be to classical logical doctrines. It considers how logical analysis can be applied to carefully represent the reasoning employed in academic and scientific work, better understand that reasoning, and identify its hidden premises. Aiming to be as much a reference work and handbook for further, independent study as a course text, it covers more material than is typically covered in an introductory course. Topics include: translation, proofs, and trees for sentential and predicate logic with identity, definite descriptions, and functional terms; normal forms; proofs and trees for the principal normal modal systems; an introduction to second order and quantified modal logic; formal syntax and semantics; mathematical induction; metatheory for many of these systems; semantics and trees for free logic, intuitionistic logic, and three-valued and paraconsistent logics. A companion website contains a detailed student solutions manual with a running commentary on all starred exercises and a set of editable slides for instructors to customize their courses.

Recently it has been argued that there are conceivable situations in which we would be led to think of our experiences as belonging to two different, entirely disconnected spaces or times. From this it follows that there is no necessity in the claim that all our experiences must be conceived of as belonging together in one space or time. Let us call the claim that all our experiences must belong to one space and time the connectedness hypothesis, and the counterclaim that there are conceivable situations in which we would be led to think of our experiences as belonging to disconnected spaces or times the discreteness hypothesis. Note that neither of these hypotheses is concerned with the nature of physical space or time: the connectedness hypothesis does not affirm that the universe can be composed only of worlds connected by some path through space or time; it affirms merely that whatever the state of the topology of the universe, we can conceive of our experiences only as related within a single space and time; the discreteness hypothesis does not affirm that the universe may be composed of two or more worlds not connected by some path through space or time; it affirms merely that it is possible for us to find ourselves in a situation where our experiences can be divided into two or more disjoint sets, such that the members of one set cannot be placed in any sort of spatiotemporal relation to the members of any other set. Perhaps either hypothesis could be used as a premise toward a conclusion about the nature of the physical world—but that would be another argument.

Reid maintained that the perceptions that we obtain from the senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch are ‘suggested’ by corresponding sensations. However, he made an exception for the sense of vision. According to Reid, our perceptions of the real figure, position, and magnitude of bodies are suggested by their visible appearances, which are not sensations but objects of perception in their own right. These visible appearances have figure, position, and magnitude, as well as ‘colour,’ and the standard view among Reid scholars has been that Reid maintained that our perceptions of visible figure, position, and magnitude are also not suggested by any sensation. They are instead suggested by the material impression on the retina. Gideon Yaffe challenges the standard interpretation. According to Yaffe, Reid believed that our perceptions of visible figure are suggested by corresponding sensations, by sensations of colour. We defend the standard interpretation of Reid. According to Reid, there is no “local sign” in our sensations of colour. The same colour sensation can be associated with different positions on the visual field, and different colour sensations can be associated to the same position on the visual field. According to Reid, we only have evidence for a correlation between the image on the retina and the perception of visible figure.