Helen Beebee

Revisionist approaches to the ethics of war seem to imply that civilians on the unjust side of a conflict can be legitimate targets of defensive attack. In response, some authors have argued that although civilians do often causally contribute to unjustified global threats – by voting for war, writing propaganda articles, or manufacturing munitions, for example – their contributions are usually too ‘small’, or ‘remote’, to make them liable to be intentionally killed to avert the threat. What defenders of this view lack, however, is a theory of causal contribution. This article sketches and defends a theory of causal contribution. We then apply it to the kinds of situation that defenders of the view are interested in. We argue, however, that since degrees of causal contribution turn out to be sensitive to particular features of the situation that are extrinsic to the agent's action, whether an agent makes a small or a large contribution to a threat may not only be very difficult to discern but in many cases may not line up very well with the kinds of intuition about liability that defenders of the view want to uphold.

There is psychological evidence that ‘typical’ characteristics can acquire normative status: what is atypical can come to be seen as deviant. I consider two main areas where this idea is relevant to the case of philosophy: first, the professional philosophy seminar or conference talk, where an adversarial, and sometimes downright hostile, atmosphere can come to be regarded as ‘the norm’, so that those who find such an atmosphere alienating are regarded as being too thin-skinned. Second, I discuss thought experiments, where, again, the ‘normal’ response can be taken to be the ‘right’ response, so that students whose own intuitions conflict are, again, regarded as being at fault in some way. In both cases there are at least _prima facie_ reasons to think that women are more likely than men to be the ‘deviants’; but there are also non-gender-based reasons to resist the move from atypicality to deviance.

I define ‘philosophical scepticism’ as the view that philosophers do not and cannot know many of the substantive philosophical claims that they make or implicitly assume. I argue for philosophical scepticism via the ‘methodology challenge’ and the ‘disagreement challenge’. I claim that the right response to philosophical scepticism is to abandon the view that philosophy aims at knowledge, and (borrowing from David Lewis) to replace it with a more modest aim: that of finding ‘equilibria’ that ‘can withstand examination’. Finally, I consider what our attitude to our own philosophical theses should be.

Recently several thought experiments have been developed (by John Carroll amongst others) which have been alleged to refute the Ramsey-Lewis view of laws of nature. The paper aims to show that two such thought experiments fail to establish that the Ramsey-Lewis view is false, since they presuppose a conception of laws of nature that is radically at odds with the Humean conception of laws embodied by the Ramsey-Lewis view. In particular, the thought experiments presuppose that laws of nature govern the behavior of objects. The paper argues that the claim that laws govern should not be regarded as a conceptual truth, and shows how the governing conception of laws manifests itself in the thought experiments. Hence the thought experiments do not constitute genuine counter-examples to the Ramsey-Lewis view. since the Humean is free to reject the conception of laws which the thought experiments presuppose.

Hume is traditionally credited with inventing the ‘regularity theory’ of causation, according to which the causal relation between two events consists merely in the fact that events of the first kind are always followed by events of the second kind. Hume is also traditionally credited with two other, hugely influential positions: the view that the world appears to us as a world of unconnected events, and inductive scepticism: the view that the ‘problem of induction’, the problem of providing a justification for inference from observed to unobserved regularities, is insoluble. Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects.

According to ‘regularity theories’ of causation, the obtaining of causal relations depends on no more than the obtaining of certain kinds of regularity. Regularity theorists are thus anti-realists about necessary connections in nature. Regularity theories of one form or another have constituted the dominant view in analytic Philosophy for a long time, but have recently come in for some robust criticism, notably from Galen Strawson. Strawson’s criticisms are natural criticisms to make, but have not so far provoked much response from regularity theorists. The paper considers and rebuts Strawson’s objections. For example, Strawson claims that if there were no necessary connections in nature, we ought continually to find the regularity of the Universe surprising. I argue that the fact that the Universe is regular is something we take ourselves (fallibly) to know, and hence, in the light of this knowledge, its continued orderliness is not at all surprising.

Essentialism--roughly, the view that natural kinds have discrete essences, generating truths that are necessary but knowable only _a posteriori_--is an increasingly popular view in the metaphysics of science. At the same time, philosophers of language have been subjecting Kripke’s views about the existence and scope of the necessary _a posteriori_ to rigorous analysis and criticism. Essentialists typically appeal to Kripkean semantics to motivate their radical extension of the realm of the necessary _a posteriori_; but they rarely attempt to provide any semantic arguments for this extension, or engage with the critical work being done by philosophers of language. This collection brings authors on both sides together in one volume, thus helping the reader to see the connections between views in philosophy of language on the one hand and the metaphysics of science on the other. The result is a book that will have a significant impact on the debate about essentialism, encouraging essentialists to engage with debates about the semantic presuppositions that underpin their position, and, encouraging philosophers of language to engage with the metaphysical presuppositions enshrined in Kripkean semantics.

Scepticism concerning the idea of causation being linked to contingent chance-raising is articulated in Beebee’s challenging chapter. She suggests that none of these approaches will avoid the consequence that spraying defoliant on a weed is a cause of the weed’s subsequent health. We will always be able to abstract away enough of the healthy plant processes so all that’s left is the causal chain involving defoliation and health. In those circumstances, there will be contingent chance-raising. Beebee’s conclusion is that we should reject the idea of contingent chance-raising and just accept that all causation involves chance-raising. This involves the reclassification of some intuitive cases of causation as causal processes without causation but rather hindering (a distinctive kind of process). It seems clear from this discussion and from the brief earlier remarks about the status of prevention that the classification of types of causal processes and the characterization of their link to causation are matters of some importance.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Referees, 2007-2008 Donald Ainslie University of Toronto Carla Bagnoli University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Donald Baxter University of Connecticut Tom Beauchamp Georgetown University Helen Beebee University of Birmingham Martin Bell Manchester Metropolitan University Deborah Boyle College of Charleston John Bricke University of Kansas Deborah Brown University of Queensland Dorothy Coleman Northern Illinois University Timothy Costelloe College of William and Mary Shelagh Crooks Saint Mary's University Terence Cuneo University of Vermont Martin Curd Purdue University Richard Dees University of Rochester Stewart Duncan University of Florida James Dye Northern Illinois University Walter Edelberg University of Illinois, Chicago Catherine Elgin Harvard University Richard F. Foley University of Missouri Richard Fumerton University of Iowa Rolf George University of Waterloo Theodore Gracyk Minnesota State University, Moorhead John Greco Saint Louis University Paul Guyer University of Pennsylvania Thomas Holden University of California, Santa Barbara Ward Jones Rhodes University Catherine Kemp Brooklyn College, City University of New York John Christian Laursen University of California, Riverside Douglas Lewis University of Minnesota Andrew Lister Queen's University [End Page 323] Antonia Lolordo University of Virginia Michel Malherbe Université de Nantes Alison McIntyre Wellesley College Kenneth Merrill University of Oklahoma John Nicholas University of Western Ontario David O'Connor Seton Hall University Jim O'Shea University College Dublin David Owen University of Arizona David Phillips University of Houston Nicholas Phillipson University of Edinburgh Michael Pritchard University of Western Michigan Paul Russell University of British Columbia Eric Schliesser Universiteit Leiden Malcolm Schofield Cambridge University George Frederick Schueler University of Delaware Lisa Shapiro Simon Fraser University Mark Spencer Brock University Michael Stack University of Manitoba Eric Steinberg Brooklyn College, City University of New York Christine Swanton University of Auckland Jacqueline Taylor University of San Francisco Saul Traiger Occidental College Stanley Tweyman York University Dabney Townsend Armstrong Atlantic State University Kathleen Wallace Hofstra University Cass Weller University of Washington Paul Wood University of Victoria Roger Woolhouse University of York [End Page 324]Copyright © 2009 Hume Studies...