•  1
    Hume on modal discourse
    In Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A History, Oxford University Press. pp. 140-170. 2024.
    Hume regards the ‘absolute’ necessity attending demonstrable truths as simply an expression of our imaginative blocks, and thereby avoids any commitment to a mind-independent and extra-empirical domain of absolute modal properties and facts. I develop this expressivist interpretation of Hume’s metaphysics of absolute modality, situate it against a wider understanding of Hume’s philosophy of language, and defend it against some recent objections.
  •  30
    The Meaning of Philo's Reversal
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 61 (2): 215-235. 2023.
    Abstractabstract:There are two ways of hearing Philo's unexpected endorsement of a version of the design hypothesis in the final part of Hume's Dialogues. We might register it in accordance with Cleanthes's descriptivist approach to religious speech, taking Philo to be reasoning with Cleanthes in Cleanthes's own way. Or we might hear Philo's words in accordance with his own expressivist account of religious speech, an account that Philo appears to have borrowed from Hobbes. I argue that Hume int…Read more
  •  26
    Hobbes's Philosophy of Religion
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    This book presents a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy of religion. I argue that the key to Hobbes’s treatment of religion is his theory of religious language. On that theory, the proper function of religious speech is not to affirm truths, state facts, or describe anything, but only to express non-descriptive attitudes of honor, reverence, and humility before God, the incomprehensible great cause of nature. The traditional vocabulary of theism,…Read more
  •  1
    Hume on religious language and the attributes of God
    In Angela Coventry & Alex Sager (eds.), _The Humean Mind_, Routledge. 2019.
    Hume contrasts two different ways in which we might speak about the attributes of the first cause of all: first, in an attempt to describe the actual nature of this ultimate being or principle; or second, in ascribing attributes to it as so many honorifics, with no intention to describe but merely to express our own reverence. I survey Hume’s skeptical critique of the former, descriptive kind of talk, and also examine his purposes in considering and, through his character Philo, apparently valor…Read more
  • I examine Hume’s claim in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals that the theistic form of religion tends to distort philosophical thought about the nature of morality. I argue that we can see this thesis as a local application of Hume’s wider claim, intimated in various other works, that theistic religion tends to deform philosophy more generally. Understanding Hume’s account of the general tendency of theistic religion to subjugate and deform philosophy helps us set the moral case in …Read more
  •  341
    Hobbes on the Authority of Scripture
    Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 8 68-95. 2018.
    To understand Hobbes’s handling of Christian scripture in Part 3 of Leviathan we need to see it in the light of his own radical account of the norms controlling public religious speech and practice as set out in Part 2 and in other works such as De Cive and De Corpore. As these texts make clear, Hobbes holds that we ought rationally to venerate the first cause of all, and that the proper way to venerate this awesome and incomprehensible being is to publicly adopt the local culture’s religious pr…Read more
  •  113
    Berkeley on Inconceivability and Impossibility
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 107-122. 2019.
    Contrary to a popular reading of his modal epistemology, Berkeley does not hold that inconceivability entails impossibility, and he cannot therefore argue the impossibility of mind-independent matter by appealing to facts about what we cannot conceive. Berkeley is explicit about this constraint on his metaphysical argumentation, and, I argue, does respect it in practice. Popular mythology about the ‘master argument’ notwithstanding, the only passages in which he might plausibly seem to employ th…Read more
  •  72
    Spectres of False Divinity: Hume's Moral Atheism
    Oxford University Press UK. 2010.
    Spectres of False Divinity presents a historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. In Hume's view, no first cause or designer responsible for the ordered universe could possibly have moral attributes; nor could the existence of such a being have any real implications for human practice or conduct. Hume's case for this 'moral atheism' is a central plank of both his naturalistic agenda in metaphysics and his secularizing program in m…Read more
  •  124
    Hume’s Absolute Necessity
    Mind 123 (490): 377-413. 2014.
    Hume regards the ‘absolute’ necessity attending demonstrable propositions as an expression of the limitations of human imagination. When we register our modal commitments in ordinary descriptive language, affirming that there are such-and-such absolute necessities, possibilities, and impossibilities, we are projecting our sense of what the human mind can and cannot conceive. In some ways the account parallels Hume’s famous treatment of the necessity of causes, and in some respects it anticipates…Read more
  •  115
    According to a standard interpretation of Hume’s argument against infinite divisibility, Hume is raising a purely formal problem for mathematical constructions of infinite divisibility, divorced from all thought of the stuffing or filling of actual physical continua. I resist this. Hume’s argument must be understood in the context of a popular early modern account of the metaphysical status of the parts of physical quantities. This interpretation disarms the standard mathematical objections to H…Read more
  • The Antinomy of Material Composition: Galileo to Kant
    Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2000.
    This dissertation is a historical and critical study of a controversy that raged among all the great figures of Enlightenment natural philosophy. The issue at stake is the structure or internal architecture of matter. One the one hand, an array of a priori arguments seems to show that matter must be fundamentally discrete in its fine structure: it must resolve to metaphysical atoms or monads. On the other hand, an opposing battery of a priori arguments seems to show that it must be fundamentally…Read more
  •  50
    Hobbes’s First Cause
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (4): 647-667. 2015.
    can natural human reason establish the existence of a first cause of all things? Hobbes tells us quite plainly that it can. Yet on other occasions he also tells us that our natural reason cannot rule out an eternal chain of causes with no beginning at all. The plot thickens when we consider his ambidextrous treatment of the only proof to which he gives any serious attention. On the one hand, Hobbes seems to endorse a fairly conventional version of the cosmological argument in The Elements of Law…Read more
  •  78
    Religion and Moral Prohibition in Hume’s “Of Suicide”
    Hume Studies 31 (2): 189-210. 2005.
    This paper presents a new analysis of the logical structure of Hume’s attack on the theological objection to suicide. I suggest that Hume intends his reasoning in “Of Suicide” to generalize, covering not just suicide but any arbitrary action: his implied conclusion is that no human action can violate a duty to God. I contrast my reading with a series of recent interpretations, and argue that the various criticisms of Hume’s reasoning are based on a misunderstanding of what he is about. Finally, …Read more
  •  72
    The architecture of matter: Galileo to Kant
    Oxford University Press. 2004.
    Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Ques…Read more
  •  52
    Hume on religious affect
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89 (3): 283-306. 2007.
    Although various points of Hume's canonical works hint at a critique of religious affect, his most explicit attack on such sentiments occurs in a letter of June 30th 1743 to his friend William Mure. In this letter Hume sets out an objection to all affective attitudes that are putatively directed toward God, and maintains that the Deity is not in fact the ‘natural object’ of any human passion. I examine this claim and canvass three possible interpretations of Hume's challenge to religious affect,…Read more
  •  51
    Robert Boyle on things above reason
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2). 2007.
    Various early modern philosophers affirm the traditional distinction between ‘things above reason’ and ‘things contrary to reason.’ However, it is Robert Boyle who goes furthest to rework and defend the division, and to explore its ramifications in detail. My aim here is to examine the logical structure of Boyle’s version of the distinction, and his concomitant account of the sphere of truths beyond human understanding. I also weigh the philosophical merits of the account and clarify the relatio…Read more
  •  113
    Bayle and the case for actual parts
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2): 145-164. 2004.
    : Pierre Bayle is the most forthright and systematic early modern proponent of the actual parts doctrine, the period's counterpart to the 'doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts' familiar from current analytic mereology and metaphysics. In this paper I introduce both the actual parts account of the internal structure of matter and the rival system of potential parts. I then identify Bayle as the leading advocate of the actual parts doctrine and examine his arguments for this account
  •  29
    ‘The Modern Disciple of the Academy’: Hume, Shelley, and Sir William Drummond
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (2): 161-188. 2011.
    Sir William Drummond (1770?-1828) enjoyed considerable notoriety in the early nineteenth century as the author of the Academical Questions (1805), a manifesto for immaterialism that is at the same time a creative synthesis of ancient and modern forms of scepticism. In this paper I advance an interpretation of Drummond's work that emphasises his extensive employment and adaptation of Hume's own ‘Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’. I also document the impact of the Academical Questions on the con…Read more
  •  57
    Hobbes on the function of evaluative speech
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1): 123-144. 2016.
    Hobbes’s interpreters have struggled to find a plausible semantics for evaluative language in his writings. I argue that this search is misguided. Hobbes offers neither an account of the reference of evaluative terms nor a theory of the truth-conditions for evaluative statements. Rather, he sees evaluative language simply as having the non-representational function of prescribing actions and practical attitudes, its superficially representational appearance notwithstanding. I marshal the evidenc…Read more