Lorne Falkenstein

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

I argue that Kant's refutation of Mendelssohn's proof of the immortality of the soul also refutes his own proof of the permanence of material substance. To evade this result, Kant would have had to rely on premises that can only be established empirically. This difficulty brings up deep and disturbing difficulties with Kant's theory of matter and body in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and suggests that his early Physical Monadology offered a better account, one he was constrained by later commitments to abandon to the detriment of the coherence of his matter theory.

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.

This paper considers an objection to the Humean view that perception involves introspective acquaintance with representative images. The objection, originally raised by Thomas Reid and recently endorsed by Nicholas Wolterstorff, states that no representative image can be hard, and concludes that acquaintance with such images cannot therefore account for our perception of hardness. I argue in response that a case has not been made for denying that representative images can be hard. Hardness, as understood by Hume and Reid, is the quality of having parts that resist motion relative to one another. This means that as long as it is allowed that representative images can consist of spatially disposed parts, there can be no a priori reason to deny that they might be hard as well