Hume's True Scepticism

Hume's True Scepticism

Author: Donald C. Ainslie

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0199593868

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Provides a sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise, arguing that Hume uses our reactions to the sceptical arguments as evidence in favor of his model of the mind.


Hume's Scepticism and the Science of Human Nature

Hume's Scepticism and the Science of Human Nature

Author: Paul Stanistreet

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1351929399

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This book explores the relationship between Hume's sceptical philosophy and his Newtonian ambition of founding a science of human nature. Assessing both received and 'new' readings of Hume's philosophy, Stanistreet offers a line of interpretation which, he argues, makes sense of many of the apparent conflicts and paradoxes in Hume's work and describes how well-known controversies concerning Hume's thinking about causation, induction and the external world can be resolved. Offering important new contributions to Hume scholarship, this book also surveys and assesses the new research responsible for the recent sea-change in thinking about Hume. It offers an accessible overview of these developments while suggesting significant revisions to current readings of Hume's philosophy.


Hume's Skeptical Crisis

Hume's Skeptical Crisis

Author: Robert J. Fogelin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-09-03

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0199736707

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Hume's Skeptical Crisis is a textual study of the shifts in perspective that unfold as Hume attempts to produce a complete science of human nature. In the process, Hume's standpoint shifts from buoyant optimism to profound skeptical melancholy and finally comes to rest at a stable form of mitigated skepticism.


The External World and Our Knowledge of it

The External World and Our Knowledge of it

Author: Fred Wilson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 825

ISBN-13: 0802097642

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David Hume is often considered to have been a sceptic, particularly in his conception of the individual's knowledge of the external world. However, a closer examination of his works gives a much different impression of this aspect of Hume's philosophy, one that is due for a thorough scholarly analysis. This study argues that Hume was, in fact, a critical realist in the early twentieth-century sense, a period in which the term was used to describe the epistemological and ontological theories of such philosophers as Roy Wood Sellars and Bertrand Russell. Carefully situating Hume in his historical context, that is, relative to Aristotelian and rationalist traditions, Fred Wilson makes important and unique insights into Humean philosophy. Analyzing key sections of the Treatise, the Enquiry, and the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Wilson offers a deeper understanding of Hume by taking into account the philosopher's theories of the external world. Such a reading, the author explains, is not only more faithful to the texts, but also reinforces the view of Hume as a critical realist in light of twentieth-century discussions between externalism and internalism, and between coherentists and foundationalists. Complete with original observations and ideas, this study is sure to generate debates about Humean philosophy, critical realism, and the limits of perceptual knowledge.


Hume's True Scepticism

Hume's True Scepticism

Author: Donald C. Ainslie

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-09-03

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 019106419X

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David Hume is famous as a sceptical philosopher but the nature of his scepticism is difficult to pin down. Hume's True Scepticism provides the first sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise, his deepest engagement with sceptical arguments. Hume notes there that, while reason shows that we ought not to believe the verdicts of reason or the senses, we do so nonetheless. Donald C. Ainslie argues that Hume uses our reactions to the sceptical arguments as evidence in favour of his model of the mind. If we were self-conscious subjects, superintending our rational and sensory beliefs, nothing should stop us from embracing the sceptical conclusions. But instead our minds are bundles of perceptions with our beliefs being generated, not by reflective assent, but by the imagination's association of ideas. We are not forced into the sceptical quagmire. Nonetheless, we can reflect and philosophy uses this capacity to question whether we should believe our instinctive rational and sensory verdicts. It turns out that we cannot answer this question because the reflective investigation of the mind interferes with the associative processes involved in reason and sensation. We thus must accept our rational and sensory capacities without being able to vindicate or undermine them philosophically. Hume's True Scepticism addresses Hume's theory of representation; his criticisms of Locke, Descartes, and other predecessors; his account of the imagination; his understanding of perceptions and sensory belief; and his bundle theory of the mind and his later rejection of it.


The Cambridge Companion to Hume's Treatise

The Cambridge Companion to Hume's Treatise

Author: Donald C. Ainslie

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-01-26

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0521821673

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This Companion evaluates Hume's philosophical arguments in A Treatise of Human Nature and considers their historical context, particularly within British empiricism.


Righting Epistemology

Righting Epistemology

Author: Bredo Johnsen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190662778

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Righting Epistemology defends an unrecognized Humean conception of epistemic justification, showing that he is no skeptic, and an argument of his that refutes all extant alternative conceptions. It goes on to trace the development of his thought in Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein.


Imagination in Hume's Philosophy

Imagination in Hume's Philosophy

Author: Timothy M. Costelloe

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2018-03-21

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1474436412

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Defines the cutting-edge of scholarship on ancient Greek history employing methods from social science.


An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Author: David Hume

Publisher: e-artnow

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 8027303893

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"An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" is a book by David Hume created as a revision of an earlier work, Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature". The argument of the Enquiry proceeds by a series of incremental steps, separated into chapters which logically succeed one another. After expounding his epistemology, Hume explains how to apply his principles to specific topics. This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber."