Lorne Falkenstein

Marina Frasca-Spada's Space and the Self in Hume's Treatise proposes a subjective idealist interpretation of Hume's account of space in part ii of Book I of the Treatise. The book is divided into four chapters. The first deals with Hume's position on infinite divisibility in I ii 1-2, the second with his position on the origin of the idea of space in I ii 3, the third with his account of geometrical knowledge in I ii 4, and the final chapter with his position on vacuum in I ii 5. The subject matter of I ii 6 on the idea of existence is dealt with over the course of the third chapter. Between the second and third chapters, the exposition is interrupted by what Frasca-Spada calls an "Intermezzo." This piece begins by promising to explain why Hume's theory of space is "central to the philosophical substance of the Treatise", but turns to other topics before delivering on the promise. Its relation to the other parts of the book is unclear, and it would have been better included as a preface or appendix, or omitted altogether.

In this paper I argue that Hume's thought on comportment between the sexes developed over time. In the Treatise he was interested in explaining why the world seeks to impose artificial virtues of chastity and modesty on women and girls, and how it manages to do this so successfully. But as time passed he became increasingly concerned with justice towards women and the role of free interactions between the sexes in facilitating sociability. While his later work continues to explain the origin of the artificial female virtues of chastity and modesty in the way he had in the Treatise, it also recognizes and condemns proprietary attitudes towards women and surveys various ways of achieving a balance between male jealousy and sociability. It concludes by condemning the male vices of jealousy and "gallantry" while suggesting that the emphasis on female chastity and modesty is excessive.

This is the first edition in over a century to present David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Dissertation on the Passions, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and Natural History of Religion in the format he intended: collected together in a single volume. Hume has suffered a fate unusual among great philosophers. His principal philosophical work is no longer published in the form in which he intended it to be read. It has been divided into separate parts, only some of which continue to be published. This volume repairs that neglect by presenting the four pieces that Hume in later life desired to "alone be regarded as containing [his] philosophical sentiments and principles" in the format he preferred, as a single volume with an organization that parallels that of his early Treatise of Human Nature. This edition's introduction comments on the historical origins and evolution of the four parts and draws attention to how they mutually inform and support one another. The text is based on the first (1758) edition of Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Notes advise the reader of the changes made in the final (1777) edition. Excerpts from the work of some of Hume's most important contemporary critics are included as appendices. Hume's abundant references to ancient historians, geographers, poets, and philosophers—many of them now quite obscure—are rendered accessible in this volume through extensive textual notes and a bibliography of online sources

Peter Millican’s Reading Hume on Human Understanding is a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of the first Enquiry and of the secondary literature on that work. As Millican notes, the first Enquiry has standardly been received as “a watered-down version of Book I of the Treatise, a more elegant and less taxing easy-read edition for the general public, with the technical details omitted and a few controversial sections on religion added to whet their appetite and provoke the ‘zealots’”. To the contrary, Millican views the first Enquiry as the canonical statement of the mature Hume’s views. In Millican’s estimation it corrects mistakes made in the Treatise and refocuses attention on those themes and arguments that subsequent philosophers have found to be the most enduringly valuable. For this reason alone it deserves more attention than it has been given. Together with Stephen Buckle’s Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, Reading Hume goes a long way to remedying this oversight.

This paper contrasts three different positions taken by 18th century British scholars on how sensations, particularly sensations of colour and touch, come to be localized in space: Berkeley’s view that we learn to localize ideas of colour by associating certain purely qualitative features of those ideas with ideas of touch and motion, Hume’s view that visual and tangible impressions are originally disposed in space, and Reid’s view that we are innately disposed to refer appearances of colour to the end of a line passing through the centre of the eye and originating from the spot on the back of the retina where the material impression causing that appearance was received. Reid’s reasons for rejecting the Berkeleian and Humean views are examined. It is argued that Reid’s position on visual localization is ultimately driven by his dualistic metaphysical commitments rather than by an empirically grounded investigation of the phenomena of vision. To this extent, his position sits uncomfortably with his own methodological commitments

It might seem inappropriate to describe Kant as an empiricist. He believed, contrary to the basic empiricist principle, that there are nontrivial propositions that can be known independently of experience. He devoted virtually all of his efforts as a researcher to discovering how it is possible for us to have this "synthetic a priori" knowledge. However, Kant also believed that there are some things that we can know only through sensory experience. Though he did not give these empirical propositions the attention he lavished on their a priori companions, they are both numerous and significant. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of empirical elements in Kant's thought, and to expand on some of the implications that a due appreciation of this empiricism has for the interpretation of his positions on causality, the systematic unity of laws, and realism. In the process a pair of hitherto neglected Kantian notions will come up for close scrutiny: those of affinity and of the exponent of a rule.

Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense devotes more space to double vision than to any other topic. In what follows, I examine why this subject was so important to Reid and why he dealt with it as he did. I also consider whether his argument for his position begs the question against his main opponents, Berkeley and Robert Smith. I show that, as Reid presented it, it does, but that he could have said more than he did in reply to Smith. My discussion of why double vision was important for Reid begins with an exposition of the relevance of the theory of vision for one of Reid's principal concerns in the Inquiry: the concern to respond to scepticism concerning our knowledge of an external world. I then turn to consider how Reid's account of double vision contributes to his epistemological realism and why the alternative account offered by Berkeley and Smith challenges it.

(Originally published in _Reid Studies_ 4 (2000-01): 35-51.) 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.

This book presents a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of all of the major arguments and explanations in the "aesthetic" of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The first part of the book aims to provide a clear analysis of the meanings of the terms Kant uses to name faculties and types of representation, the second offers a thorough account of the reasoning behind the "metaphysical" and "transcendental" expositions, and the third investigates the basis for Kant's major conclusions about space, time, appearances, things in themselves, and the cognitive constitution of the subject. A major goal of the work is to establish that Kant takes spatiotemporal form to be originally given through the constitution of the subject's receptive faculty, not generated through synthetic procedures of the imagination or understanding.

This paper outlines the history of the distinction between a higher and a lower cognitive function up to Kant. It is argued that Kant initially drew the distinction in Scholastic terms--as a distinction between a capacity to image particulars and a capacity to represent universals. However, features of his project in the Critique led him to reformulate the distinction in terms of immediacy and mediacy. Nonetheless, for certain purposes the older, Scholastic distinction retained its attractiveness, and this is the ground for much of the subsequent difficulty with his account of intuitions and concepts.

Drawing on work done by Helmholtz, I argue that Reid was in no position to infer that objects appear as if projected on the inner surface of a sphere, or that they have the geometric properties of such projections even though they do not look concave towards the eye. A careful consideration of the phenomena of visual experience, as further illuminated by the practice of visual artists, should have led him to conclude that the sides of visible appearances either look straight, in which case their angles appear to approximate Euclidean measures, or their angles do not appear to approximate Euclidean measures for straight line figures, in which case their sides do not look straight.

Reid declared Hume's appeal to variation in the magnitude of a table with distance to be the best argument that had ever been offered for the ‘ideal hypothesis’ that we experience nothing but our own mental states. Reid's principal objection to this argument fails to apply to minimally visible points. He did establish that we have reason to take our perceptions to be caused by external objects. But his case that we directly perceive external objects is undermined by what Hume had to say about the role played by color in our perception of the primary qualities of bodies.

Hume's scepticism about the ability of demonstrative reasoning to justify many of our most common and important beliefs, such those concerning the connection between causes and effects, does not sit well with his tendency to make normative claims about which beliefs we ought to accept. I argue that Hume's naturalist account of the causes of belief is nonetheless rich enough to provide for normative assessments of belief and even for the modification of beliefs in light of these assessments. I argue, moreover, that far from interfering with his normative claims, Hume's appeals to the force of sceptical arguments are essential premises for this result.

This paper examines Berkeley's attitude toward our perception of spatial relations on the two- dimensional visual field. This is a topic on which there has been some controversy. Historians of visual theory have tended to suppose that Berkeley took "all" spatial relations to be derived in the way our knowledge of depth is: from association of more primitive sensations which are themselves in no way spatial. But many philosophers commenting on Berkeley have supposed that he takes our awareness of two- dimensional visual layout to be directly perceived. I argue that Berkeley's position on this issue is deeply ambivalent and that neither alternative sits well with the rest of his philosophy.

On the basis of an examination of Kant's correspondence with Mendelssohn, 1766-1770, I argue that already in 1770 Kant had before him a decisive refutation of the view that time is imposed by the mind on its representations, and that Kant did not hold any such view of the subjectivity of time in his later work. Kant's mature view is that time is subjective only in the sense that it is the manner in which the empirically observable subject receives sensory matter, not in the sense that the subject actually produces this manner of receptivity.

Anthony Quinton has argued that the trouble with Kant is that he does not take empirical experience to have any significant role to play in our knowledge of the world, and as a result is forced to take the imposition of a priori forms and categories to be arbitrary and unguided. While Quinton has pointed to a serious short-coming with those more rationalistic interpretations of Kant that would ascribe a dominant role to the understanding or the imagination in constituting experience, I make a case for an empiricist reading of Kant that, by taking significant aspects of our empirical intuitions to be simply given prior to any intellectual or imaginative acts, is able to circumvent the difficulties Quinton has raised.

Reid is well known for rejecting the "philosophy of ideas"--a theory of mental representation that he claimed to find in its most vitriolic form in Hume. But there was another component of Hume's philosophy that exerted an equally powerful influence on Reid: Hume's attack on the notion of spiritual substance in _Treatise 1.4.5. I summarize this neglected aspect of Hume's philosophy and argue that much of Reid's epistemology can be explained as an attempt to buttress dualism against the effects of Hume's critique

Scholars have almost universally agreed that Hume's account of space and time as manners of disposition of impressions is inconsistent with one of the most fundamental tenets of his empiricism: the thesis that all ideas are derived from simple impressions. This paper challenges that view and argues that Hume's position on the origin of our ideas of space and time is a profound, original, virtually unique, and even courageous approach to the problem of original space and time cognition, and a theory that allows for hitherto unrecognized expansions to the resources available to his empiricism.