Taro Okamura

This paper examines a tension in Hume’s philosophy between his epistemic critique of superstition and his naturalistic epistemology. While Hume faults superstition for its epistemic flaws, naturalistic interpretations often claim that he evaluates reasoning by its psychological force, such as liveliness or irresistibility. This raises a challenge: if superstitious reasoning stems from standard psychological processes and exhibits psychological strength, how can it be epistemically discredited? I argue that Hume’s notion of good reasoning involves more than psychological force. He appeals to calm passions as an additional normative standard. Calm passions arise in response to epistemic factors, particularly certainty, whereas superstitious reasoning provokes violent passions through its uncertainty. Importantly, however, calmness does not require absolute certainty, and it marks a moderate and attainable level of epistemic commitment—one that enables inquiry while resisting the violent agitation characteristic of both superstition and radical skepticism.

In the concluding section of the Book One of the Treatise, Hume confronts radical scepticism about the standards of correct reasoning. According to the naturalistic interpretations, Hume resolves this scepticism by appealing to some psychological facts. A common criticism of this interpretation is that the alleged naturalistic epistemic norm seems to be merely Hume’s report of his psychology, and it remains unclear why this seemingly mere psychological description can provide a principled reason to overcome his scepticism. In this paper, I will argue that Hume’s discussions of the “indirect passions” and social identity provide a constitutivist ground for the naturalistic epistemic standards in the “Conclusion”: being the object of the indirect passions constitutes what kind of person one is, and being the kind of person (philosopher in Hume’s case) gives non-optional reason to pursue certain kinds of reasoning.

Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate responses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s account of responsibility. I argue this on the grounds that without reference to the passions, Hume does not have the resources to distinguish between responsible and non-responsible entities. Instead, I attribute to Hume a distinctive, sympathy-based response-dependent conception of responsibility.