Cass Weller

In this paper, I argue that Hume accepts two claims. The first is that it is not possible for a human agent, having adopted an end, to remain committed to it, have it in view, and be indifferent to what he or she acknowledges as the proper means of realizing it, where indifference is the absence of a favoring attitude.1 The second is that, other things being equal, an agent who fails through weak resolve to take the acknowledged means to an acknowledged end violates a norm of practical agency akin to Kant’s hypothetical imperative understood as a command to take the means—that is, to do what has the prospect of realizing the ends one happens to have adopted. I begin with the first claim because some..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 51-85 Scratched Fingers, Ruined Lives, and Acknowledged Lesser Goods CASS WELLER It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person wholly unknown to me. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. (T 2.3.3.6; SBN 416)1 Everyone is familiar with the cases Hume parades in this passage when he dramatically displays just how far one's preferences and other passions can go without being contrary to reason. His general point is tediously clear. Whatever failing there is in one who prefers the destruction of the world to the scratching of his finger or chooses his total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of a person wholly unknown to him, it is not a failing of reason, unless this preference and choice involve false suppositions of fact, existence, or mathematics. But they do not according to Hume. So they are not contrary to reason. At the same time, anyone who is given to worrying and fretting over the text will be initially somewhat at a loss to explain in any further detail the nature of the phenomena Hume flaunts as not flouting reason and how they relate to one another. For example, is the notion of preference at work that of a settled judgment of value or that of a blind impulse to be understood only in terms of strength of desire? Is the character Hume inhabits in the first person one who simply finds himself with a blind urge to keep his finger scratch-free or one who Cass Weiler is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 52 Cass Weller has a settled policy of keeping his finger scratch-free viewed as more valuable than anything else. Is preferring my lesser good to my acknowledged greater good the practical counterpart of self-consciously believing that Ï• and not p? Or is it, rather, a common form of weakness? And if so, how is it related to the two previous cases? Although most discussions of Hume's views on practical reason refer to this passage, I know of no extended discussion of the three notorious cases.2 This is no doubt due in part to the fact that the details do not really matter for understanding the main point. A mental state not involving a false belief of experience or a priori reason cannot be contrary to reason.3 Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to try and figure out just what Hume is saying and that by digging right here we may hope to uncover important aspects of Hume's theory of evaluation, motive, and reason. The task is to get a more detailed view of Hume's own theoretical understanding of the preferences and choices he exhibits as not contrary to reason, in particular whether a preference is an evaluative attitude, and how it may conflict with an acknowledged interest. To this end we will have to go beyond what is adequate for a reader's understanding of the preferences in their narrow rhetorical context. Hume himself invites the reader, inadvertently or not, to look for the wider Humean explanation of preferring one's acknowledged lesser good to the greater by deploying the analogy of a one pound weight's raising a hundred through the advantage of its situation. This idea connects with other passages in the Treatise, as we shall see, in particular with Hume's discussion of the preference for the contiguous over the remote at T 3.2.7 (SBN 534-9). With a clearer view of Hume's understanding of the preferences we will be in a better position to ask about the sort of criticism persons with such preferences are subject to. And, to tip my hand, we will see that Hume...

Keyt's analysis of the argument for the imperishability of the soul at _Phaedo (102a-107b10) as well as the author's Plato relies on a causal likeness inference, 'Because of x, F's are F; so x is F'. However, for Keyt the inference occurs at the metaphysical level, so to speak: 'because of some immanent character x, living things are alive so x is alive'. Here x is of the wrong logical type to be predicatively alive. On the author's view, however, the inference occurs at a lower level: 'because of souls, first level individuals that are the subjects of psychological states, living things are alive; so souls are alive'. Here it is still logically possible that souls are predicatively alive. But Plato has not shown that they are. At most he has shown that souls, being predicatively whatever they are, are also by nature eminently alive in Descartes's sense, i.e., are predicatively whatever it takes for them to make living things live

The myth of original existence is a story told by many readers of Hume. According to it, the author of the Treatise argues that no passion is unreasonable or contrary to reason on the grounds that passions have no ingredient ideas, and, having no ingredient ideas, are in no position to disagree with or be contrary to the product of reason, belief. While Hume doesn't actually say that passions contain no ideas to provide them with their objects, he does say that "a passion is an original existence... and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence". I shall refer to the uninterpreted argument in this passage as The Argument.

According to Plato's Theaetetus and Philebus an act of sense-perception consists in a bodily disturbance produced by a sensible object and a corresponding disturbance in the soul. The bodily disturbance is best thought of as a state of sensory stimulation in the appropriate sense organ. The resulting disturbance in the soul is an act of perceptual awareness of the sensible object at the other end of the causal chain. The perceptual awareness involved is classificatory in the sense that the sensible object appears to the perceiver in some sensible character, e.g., as red or sweet. ;This interpretation runs counter to the currently prevailing interpretations of a central argument in the Theaetetus against the claim that sense-perception is knowledge . The crucial premise in this argument is that sense-perception cannot grasp the being of its object. On recent interpretations the inability to grasp being is the inability to frame simple propositions of the form, 'a is F', and by implication the general inability to be aware of anything, insofar as to be aware of something implies being aware of it as something, i.e., under a concept. ;I argue, contrary to this view, that for Plato sense-perception's inability to grasp the being of its object is its inability to locate its object in an objective world and not the sort of conceptual impoverishment that would exclude even minimal awareness from an act of sense-perception. Since, as is widely held, Aristotle allows minimal classificatory content in sense-perception, the position I defend reestablishes a point of similarity between the two. ;Moreover, the elements of the Platonic account are essentially preserved by Aristotle, if one allows for the difference between Plato's soul-body substance dualism and Aristotle's form-matter property dualism. The bodily disturbance in the Platonic account corresponds to the physiology appropriate to the material description, while the psychic disturbance in the Platonic account, which constitutes perceptual awareness, corresponds in the Aristotelian account to the form of an act of sense-perception. ;On Aristotle's formal characterization the perceiver becomes like its object. This is to be interpreted, along the lines suggested by the Greek commentators, to mean that the perceiver becomes representatively like its object, and constitutes Aristotle's reinterpretation of the traditional dictum that like is known/perceived by like