• Hume on space and time : a limited defense
    In Angela Coventry & Alex Sager (eds.), _The Humean Mind_, Routledge. 2019.
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    The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. Costelloe (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (3): 559-560. 2019.
    The imagination has a central place in Hume’s science of human nature: he attributes numerous important features of our mental and social lives to this faculty. However, few studies of his thought have made it their focal topic. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy is intended to address “this lack in the literature” (x).
  •  454
    Hume’s Answer to Bayle on the Vacuum
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 101 (2): 205-236. 2019.
    Hume’s discussion of space in the Treatise addresses two main topics: divisibility and vacuum. It is widely recognized that his discussion of divisibility contains an answer to Bayle, whose Dictionary article “Zeno of Elea” presents arguments about divisibility as support for fideism. It is not so widely recognized that, elsewhere in the same article, Bayle presents arguments about vacuum as further support for fideism. This paper aims to show that Hume’s discussion of vacuum contains an answer …Read more
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    Hume on mental representation and intentionality
    Philosophy Compass 13 (7). 2018.
    The past two decades have seen an explosion of literature on Hume's views about mental representation and intentionality. This essay gives a roadmap of this literature, while arguing for two main interpretive claims. First, Hume aims to naturalize all forms of mental representation and intentionality, that is, to explain them in terms of properties and relations that are found throughout the natural world (not just in minds) and that are not, individually, peculiar to representational or intenti…Read more
  •  40
    The Oxford Handbook of Hume (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (3): 622-625. 2018.
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    A Puzzle about Fictions in the Treatise
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (1): 47-73. 2016.
    in the treatise, hume claims to identify many “fictions of the imagination” among both “vulgar” and philosophical beliefs. To name just a few, these include the fiction of one aggregate composed of many parts,1 the fiction of a material object’s identity through change, and the fiction of a human mind’s identity through change and interruption in its existence. Hume claims that these fictions and others like them are somehow defective: in his words, they are “improper,” “inexact,” or not “strict…Read more
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    Minds, Composition, and Hume's Skepticism in the Appendix
    Philosophical Review 124 (4): 533-569. 2015.
    This essay gives a new interpretation of Hume's second thoughts about minds in the Appendix, based on a new interpretation of his view of composition. In Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume argued that, as far as we can conceive it, a mind is a whole composed by all its perceptions. But—this essay argues—he also held that several perceptions form a whole only if the mind to which they belong supplies a “connexion” among them. In order to do so, it must contain a further perception or perceptions. But w…Read more