Angela M. Coventry

The Historical Dictionary of Hume's Philosophy is the only Hume dictionary in existence. The book provides a substantial account of David Hume's life and the times in which he lived, and it provides an overview of his philosophical doctrines. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over a hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries covering key terms, as well as brief discussions of Hume's major works and of some of his most important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

Despite the widely recognized importance of Hume's theory of causation, there is no agreement amongst commentators about the upshot of that theory. Causal realists interpret Hume as believing that causal statements are true or false due to the existence in the universe of a power linking causes to effects, while causal anti-realists read him as denying that the existence of powers makes causal statements true or false, and as holding instead either that causal statements can be reduced to statements about regularities in nature or that causal statements express feelings and cannot be genuine propositions, susceptible of truth or falsity. There appears to be considerable textual evidence for, and also against, each interpretation. The explanation for this contradictory appearance, I argue, is that Hume maintains a position that is intermediate between realism and anti-realism. On my interpretation, Hume indeed traces the impression of power between causes and effects to a feeling in the mind and denies that our causal discourse implicates the existence of powers in nature. At the same time, however, he recognizes causal judgments as genuine propositions that are not equivalent to statements of regularities. Hence, anti-realist interpretations are right to emphasize that Hume rejects an account of causation in terms of powers, but wrong to suppose that this leads him either to reductionism or emotivism. Causal realist interpretations are right to suppose that Hume attributes a non-reductionistic truth-value to causal statements, but wrong to think that the truth or falsity of these statements results from correspondence with powers. The intermediate position attributed to Hume is a version of quasi-realism about causation. It is sometimes argued that quasi-realism collapses into a version of either realism or anti-realism, but I outline a topic-independent conception of quasi-realism that allows it to stand as a consistent third alternative.

Contrary to intuitions that human beings are free to think and act with “buck-stopping” freedom, philosophers since Holbach and Hume have argued that universal causation makes free will nonsensical. Contemporary neuroscience has strengthened their case and begun to reveal subtle and counterintuitive mechanisms in the processes of conscious agency. Although some fear that determinism undermines moral responsibility, the opposite is true: free will, if it existed, would undermine coherent systems of justice. Moreover, deterministic views of human choice clarify the conditions in which we ought to protect people from themselves, for example when they cannot give informed consent to medical procedures. Some of the most unresolved questions in this domain are just now emerging; they include robot ethics and the responsibilities of groups. We propose a philosophical and scientific research program to apply complex systems science to these problems.

Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and philosophical reasons to attribute to Locke the view not that conscious states are accompanied by higher-order perceptions, but rather that conscious states constitute perceptions of themselves.

Simon Blackburn’s How to Read Hume, Robert Fogelin’s Hume’s Skeptical Crisis: A Textual Study and John P. Wright’s Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’: An Introduction are all clear and highly readable works directed at audiences of students and other non-specialists. Given that all three of the authors are prominent and distinguished Hume scholars, I suspect these works will be of great interest to Hume specialists as well. This piece first summarizes the aims and methods of each book and next, by way of evaluation, compares and contrasts each author’s work on four features that contribute to the general character of an introductory work devoted to Hume’s philosophy. These features include selection of topics..