•  2
    Shepherd’s Case for the Demonstrability of Causal Principles
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    Shepherd’s philosophy centers on her rejection of Hume’s arguments against the demonstrability of causal principles. According to Shepherd, the causal maxim—everything that begins to exist must have a cause—is demonstratively true. She begins her first major philosophical work with a proof of this maxim. While scholars have complained that the proof seems blatantly circular, a closer look at Shepherd’s texts and their Lockean background dispels this worry. Shepherd’s premises are motivated not b…Read more
  •  125
    Time for Hume’s Unchanging Objects
    Philosophers' Imprint 23 (16). 2023.
    In his discussion of our idea of time in the Treatise, Hume makes the perplexing claim that unchanging objects cannot be said to endure. While Hume is targeting the Newtonian conception of absolute time, it is not at all clear how his denial that unchanging objects are in time fits with this target. Moreover, Hume diagnoses our belief that unchanging objects endure as the product of a psychological fiction, but his account of this fiction is also riddled with puzzling claims about our experien…Read more
  •  38
    Hume's Dual Criteria for Memory
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2): 336-358. 2019.
    In his brief treatment of memory, Hume characterizes memory using two kinds of criteria: ideas’ phenomenal character and their correspondence to the past experiences from which they derived. These criteria have seemed so perplexing to interpreters, both individually and jointly, that Hume’s account of memory is commonly considered one of the weakest parts of his philosophical system. This paper defends Hume’s criteria by showing that they achieve two theoretical aims: a scientific classification…Read more
  •  28
    Hume on presentation and philosophy
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (S1): 67-81. 2012.
    Most philosophers agree that an argument's presentation is relevant to its philosophical merit. This paper explains why David Hume considered presentation philosophically important. On Hume's epistemology, presentation is closely connected with two principal aims of philosophical arguments: persuasion and epistemic justification. Hume's views imply that presentation is a factor determining an argument's persuasiveness and that, by philosophical standards of justification, presentation is also a …Read more