Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise
Author: Louis E. Loeb
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
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Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise
Author: Louis E. Loeb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-09-19
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 0198033508
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDavid Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is famous for its extreme skepticism. Louis Loeb argues that Hume's destructive conclusions have in fact obscured a constructive stage that Hume abandons prematurely. Working within a philosophical tradition that values tranquillity, Hume favors an epistemology that links justification with settled belief. Hume appeals to psychological stability to support his own epistemological assessments, both favorable regarding causal inference, and unfavorable regarding imaginative propensities. The theory's success in explaining Hume's epistemic distinctions gives way to pessimism, since Hume contends that reflection on beliefs is deeply destabilizing. So much the worse, Hume concludes, for placing a premium on reflection. Hume endorses and defends the position that stable beliefs of unreflective persons are justified, though they would not survive reflection. At the same time, Hume relishes the paradox that unreflective beliefs enjoy a preferred epistemic status and strains to establish it. Loeb introduces a series of amendments to the Treatise that secures a more positive result for justified belief while maintaining Hume's fundamental principles. In his review of Hume's applications of his epistemology, Loeb uncovers a stratum of psychological doctrine beyond associationism, a theory of conditions in which beliefs are felt to conflict and of the resolution of this uneasiness or dissonance. This theory of mental conflict is also essential to Hume's strategy for integrating empiricism about meaning with his naturalism. However, Hume fails to provide a general account of the conditions in which conflicting beliefs lead to persisting instability, so his theory is incomplete. Loeb explores Hume's concern with stability in reference to his discussions of belief, education, the probability of causes, unphilosophical probability, the belief in body, sympathy and moral judgment, and the passions, among other topics.
Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Volume IX
Author: Donald Rutherford
Publisher:
Published: 2020-01-02
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 0198852452
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.
Hume's Epistemological Evolution
Author: Hsueh Qu
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 0190066296
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHume's Epistemological Evolution argues that Hume's Enquiry represents a significant departure from the Treatise in respect of its epistemological framework. The Treatise's treatment of skepticism is an unsatisfactory one, as Hume seems to realize, and he therefore forms a new epistemological framework in the Enquiry. Qu's central argument is that Hume's epistemology evolves between these two works.
Hume and the Demands of Philosophy
Author: Nathan I. Sasser
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2022-03-02
Total Pages: 203
ISBN-13: 1793623228
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHume and the Demands of Philosophy: Science, Skepticism, and Moderation offers a comprehensive interpretation of the relationship between Hume’s scientific project and his skepticism. Nathan I. Sasser argues that Hume is a radical epistemic skeptic who has purely practical reasons for retaining the beliefs that are essential for ordinary life and scientific research. On Sasser’s reading, the key to Hume’s epistemology is his conception of philosophy as a normative method of inquiry governing the special sciences. Philosophy approves of the mental faculties that produce reasoning and sensory beliefs. But sensory beliefs and the products of reason themselves face insuperable rational defeater arguments, and because they do, philosophy demands that we suspend these beliefs. Hume’s solution to this skeptical dilemma is to point out the fatal practical consequences of doing so. He advises us not to submit to the demands of philosophy when doing so is neither agreeable nor useful to ourselves or others. Hume’s moderate approach to philosophy recognizes that if the human mind is not created by a beneficent deity, then we must learn to live with the divergence between the epistemic demands of philosophy and the practical demands of life.
Feelings of Believing
Author: Ryan Hickerson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2020-02-28
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1498577180
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Feelings of Believing: Psychology, History, Phenomenology, Ryan Hickerson demonstrates that philosophers as diverse as Hume, Descartes, Husserl, and William James all treated believing as feeling. He argues that doxastic sentimentalism, therefore, is considerably more central to modern epistemology than philosophers have recognized. When the empirical psychology of overconfidence and attention is brought to bear on the history of philosophy and the phenomenology of believing, all point toward belief as fundamentally affective. Understanding believing as feeling has the potential to make us better believers, both by encouraging suspicion of unexamined certainties and by focusing attention on credulity. Hickerson argues that believing is typically felt but not given attention by the believer, and he suggests that virtuous believers are those who pay careful attention to their own sentiments-- who attempt to raise their beliefs to the level of judgments.
Reflection and the Stability of Belief
Author: Louis E. Loeb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-09-15
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 0199709319
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA unifying theme of Loeb's work is epistemological - that Descartes and Hume advance theories of knowledge that rely on a substantial 'naturalistic' component, adopting one or another member of a cluster of psychological properties of beliefs as the goal of inquiry and the standard for assessing belief-forming mechanisms. Thus Loeb shows a surprising affinity between the epistemologies of the two figures -- surprising because they are often thought of as polar opposites in this respect. Descartes and Hume are unique in that their philosophical texts are accessible beyond just a narrow audience in the history of philosophy; their ideas continue to be a vital part of the field at large. This volume will thus appeal to advanced students and scholars not just in the history of early modern philosophy but in epistemology and other core areas of the discipline.
Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Volume X
Author: Donald Rutherford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 0192897446
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.
An Evolutionary Paradigm for International Law
Author: J. Gillroy
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2013-12-05
Total Pages: 592
ISBN-13: 1137376651
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book transcends conventional social scientific method, political theory and its understanding of global governance to make the study of the philosophical essence of the international legal system fully accessible.
The Pursuits of Philosophy
Author: Annette C. Baier
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2011-10-04
Total Pages: 79
ISBN-13: 0674261844
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMarking the tercentenary of David Hume's birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume’s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order. Excerpts from Hume’s autobiography at the beginning of each chapter open a window onto the eighteenth-century context in which Hume’s philosophy developed. Famous in Christian Britain as a polymath and a nonbeliever, Hume recounts how his early encounters with clerical authority laid the foundation for his lifelong skepticism toward religion. In Scotland, where he grew up, he had been forced to study lists of sins in order to spot his own childish flaws, he reports. Later, as a young man, he witnessed the clergy’s punishment of a pregnant unmarried servant, and this led him to question the violent consequences of the Church’s emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Baier’s clear interpretation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature explains the link between Hume’s growing disillusionment and his belief that ethics should be based on investigations of human nature, not on religious dogma. Four months before he died, Hume concluded his autobiography with a eulogy he wrote for his own funeral. It makes no mention of his flaws, critics, or disappointments. Baier’s more realistic account rivets our attention on connections between the way Hume lived and the way he thought—insights unavailable to Hume himself, perhaps, despite his lifelong introspection.
