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94Habermas and pragmatism (edited book)Routledge. 2002.Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himse…Read more
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43The False Hume in PragmatismThe Pluralist 15 (2): 1-24. 2020.there are two lines of influence of David Hume on the history of classical American pragmatism: the familiar atomist-nominalist-associationist of empirical psychology reviled by Kantian and idealist critics, on the one side, and the conjectural historian and early developmentalist, or evolutionary, philosopher who was important to Darwin, on the other. The classical pragmatists received the first most directly through the work of Thomas Hill Green, in his edition of the Treatise of Human Nature—…Read more
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The Importance of "Mere Conception" in David Hume's Theory of BeliefDissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook. 1995.Belief is a species of mere conception, and is modifiable, rather than bivalent (believing or disbelieving). The attendant-impression theory of transformation of conception into belief expresses the moral dimension of one and the same thing, of which the manner-of-conception (without attendant impression) theory of the transformation refers to the epistemic dimension of that same thing. These two aspects of the transformation of conception into belief point to an ambiguity in Hume's use of the…Read more
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"The False Hume in Pragmatism"The Pluralist 12 (TBA). 2017--in press.The atomist Hume inherited by classical American pragmatism is a false Hume. I trace the origins and reception of the atomist Hume in the pragmatic tradition and the correction of this reading in modern Hume scholarship, and then argue (1) that in the Treatise Hume assumes that we first encounter wholes, not parts, in experience, (2) that the distinction of parts is possible only after the experience of wholes, and (3) that their distinction as well as their separation is not real, pace James, …Read more
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11"Contrariety in Hume"Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 62 (3): 55-64. 2007.Contrariety is essential to Hume's notion of experience. Its role suggests that experience itself, its specificity, and the contrariety of events must be actual, not merely hypothetical.
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45Dewey’s Darwin and Darwin’s HumeThe Pluralist 12 (2): 1-26. 2017.In The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), Dewey characterizes Hume as an orthodox empiricist wedded to a static and unchanging view of mental life. The lead essay argues that Darwinism is a cure for the errors of traditional empiricism. This paper demonstrates that Hume is a precursor to Darwin, and thus to Dewey, by reviewing the historical case that Hume directly influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution. Using Dewey’s discussion of the design versus chance problem, the paper throws li…Read more
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307The Innateness Charge: Conception and Belief for Reid and HumeReid Studies 3 (2): 43. 2000.Hume's notion of conception is closer to Reid's than Reid realizes and may lie behind Hume's charge in the letter to Hugh Blair (1762) that Reid's philosophy "leads us back to innate ideas".
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11The Uses of Abstraction: Remarks on Interdisciplinary Efforts in Law and PhilosophyDenver University Law Review 74 (4): 877-888. 1997.
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273Experience matters: Indifference and determination in Humes'sJournal of Speculative Philosophy 16 (4): 243-255. 2002.
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16Habermas Among The Americans: Some Reflections On The Common LawDenver University Law Review 76 (4): 1999. 1999.
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60"The Real 'Letter to Arbuthnot'? a Motive For Hume's Probability Theory in an Early Modern Design Argument"British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3): 468-491. 2014.John Arbuthnot's celebrated but flawed paper in the Philosophical Transactions of 1711-12 is a philosophically and historically plausible target of Hume's probability theory. Arbuthnot argues for providential design rather than chance as a cause of the annual birth ratio, and the paper was championed as a successful extension of the new calculations of the value of wagers in games of chance to wagers about natural and social phenomena. Arbuthnot replaces the earlier anti-Epicurean notion of chan…Read more
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37Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint (review)Philosophical Inquiry 32 (3-4): 118-120. 2010.Review of Frederic R. Kellogg, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., _Legal Theory And Judicial Restraint_ (Cambridge University Press 2007).
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"Law's Inertia: Custom in Logic And Experience"In Austin Sarat Patricia Ewick (ed.), Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, vol. 25, . pp. 135-149. 2002.
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57Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception (review)Hume Studies 33 (2): 339-344. 2007.Review of Ryan Nichols, _Thomas Reid's Theory of Perception_ (Oxford University Press, 2007).
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62Two Meanings of the Term "Idea": Acts and Contents in Hume's TreatiseJournal of the History of Ideas 61 (4): 675-690. 2000.Hume uses the term 'idea' to refer to both mental acts and mental contents.
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72"Our ideas in experience: Hume's examples in ' of scepticism with regard to the senses'"British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (3). 2004.The examples Hume relies on in _Treatise_ I.iv.2 raise questions about the role of contrariety in experience as it affects belief in the objects of perception.
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
David Hume |
Philosophy of Law |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Darwinism |
David Hume |