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.

In The Early Modern Subject, Udo Thiel explores early modern writings spanning approximately the seventeenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century on two topics of self consciousness, the human subject’s ‘awareness or consciousness of one’s own self’, and personal identity, the human subject’s tendency to regard one’s own self as the same identical self or person that persists through time (p. 1). The aim of the book is twofold. First, to provide an account of the development of self-consciousness and personal identity covering prominent French, British, and German thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their critics, their followers, and to ‘critically evaluate their contributions’ (p. 3). The second aim is to situate the contributions of these philosophers within their historical context. In this review I summarize and evaluate The Early Modern Subject.

There may be general agreement that David Hume is some sort of sceptic, but the nature and extent of his scepticism remains a topic of considerable debate amongst scholars. Some scholars claim his scepticism undermines the pursuit of a more positive naturalistic program of a science of human nature, while others maintain that his scepticism is reconcilable with his naturalism. In his book, Kevin Meeker maintains that Hume is a "radical sceptic" of the sort who maintains that all human beliefs are "equal, epistemically speaking" in that none of them have any "positive epistemic status" (17, 26). His interpretation is set against those scholars who emphasize his naturalism. If the main arguments in the book succeeds, then Meeker hopes to "shift the burden of proof" to those who prefer the naturalist reading (7).