Lorne Falkenstein

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.

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

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.

In this significant contribution to the history of logic and exemplary work of contextual exegesis, David Owen shows that the early modern conception of reasoning was radically different from our own and applies this insight to the interpretation of Hume. We take the conclusions of deductive arguments to be entailed by premises in virtue of the form of those arguments. But early modern philosophers had a non-formal view of reasoning, dictated by the “way of ideas.” Owen maintains that we must read Hume with this early modern conception of reasoning in mind if we are to understand his views on induction, scepticism with regard to reason, and the warrant for belief.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 chapter on classical empiricism is divided into three sections, namely, absolutism, idealism, and memory. Presentism poses a particular problem for the empiricist view that the idea of time arises from people's experience of the succession of their ideas. The view that time passes independently of the succession of ideas was shared by canonically empiricist philosophers, such as Gassendi, Locke, and Newton. The idea of time arises from a compound impression that consists of successively disposed simple impressions – impressions that may be identical in all respects but for their manner of disposition, and that may be disposed on either side of an unoccupied gap. People's experience is not confined to the present moment. The truly radical implication is that the past is not destroyed. It persists, not into the present by way of a trace or echo, but in the past, which continues to be visible to consciousness.