The Blackwell Guide to Hume's Treatise (Blackwell Guides to Great Works)

315 Pages·2006·1.38 MB·English

by  Saul Traiger

The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise
Blackwell Guides to Great Works
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Published
1 The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic Gerasimos Santas
2 The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations Stephen Gaukroger
3 The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism Henry R. West
4 The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Richard Kraut
5 The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise Saul Traiger
Forthcoming
The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics Thomas E. Hill Jr.
The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Kenneth Westphal
The Blackwell Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time Robert C. Scharff
The Blackwell Guide To
hume’s
Treatise
ediTed By Saul TraiGer
© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2006 by Saul Traiger
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First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blackwell guide to Hume’s Treatise/edited by Saul Traiger.
p. cm. – (Blackwell guides to great works)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1508-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1508-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1509-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1509-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hume, David, 1711–1776.
Treatise of human nature. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Emotions (Philosophy)
4. Ethics. I. Traiger, Saul. II. Series.
B1489.B53 2006
128–dc22
2005021975
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
References to the Treatise, Abstract, and Enquiries x
Editor’s Introduction 1
PART I: Formulation, Reception, and Scope of the Treatise 3
1 The Treatise: Composition, Reception, and Response 5
John P. Wright
2 Hume’s Other Writings 26
Wade L. Robison
PART II: The Understanding 41
3 Impressions and Ideas 43
Janet Broughton
4 Space and Time 59
Lorne Falkenstein
5 Belief, Probability, Normativity 77
William Edward Morris
6 Causation 95
Abraham Sesshu Roth
7 Identity, Continued Existence, and the External World 114
Donald L. M. Baxter
vi cont ents
8 Personal Identity and the Skeptical System of Philosophy 133
Corliss Gayda Swain
9 Hume’s Conclusions in “Conclusion of this Book” 151
Don Garrett
PART III: The Passions 177
10 The Powers and Mechanisms of the Passions 179
Lilli Alanen
11 Hume’s “New and Extraordinary” Account of the Passions 199
Jane L. McIntyre
12 Liberty, Necessity, and the Will 216
Tony Pitson
PART IV: Morals 233
13 Reason, Passion, and the Infuencing Motives of the Will 235
Mikael M. Karlsson
14 Hume’s Artifcial and Natural Virtues 256
Rachel Cohon
15 Virtue and the Evaluation of Character 276
Jacqueline Taylor
Index 297
Notes on Contributors
Lilli Alanen is Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. She is the author
of Descartes’s Concept of Mind (2003) and numerous articles in Early Modern
Philosophy. She is a co-editor of Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (1997)
and Feminist Refections on the History of Philosophy (2004), and is presently
working on a book entitled Passions and the Transformation of Reason: Descartes,
Spinoza, and Hume.
Donald L. M. Baxter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
He writes mostly in Metaphysics and Early Modern Philosophy. Recent work
on Hume includes “Hume on steadfast objects and time” (Hume Studies, 2001),
and “Hume’s theory of space and time in its skeptical context,” forthcoming
in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, 2nd edition, edited by David Fate
Norton.
Janet Broughton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California,
Berkeley. She is the author of Descartes’s Method of Doubt (2002); with John
Carriero, she is co-editing The Blackwell Companion to Descartes.
Rachel Cohon is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Albany,
State University of New York. She is the editor of Hume: Moral and Political
Philosophy (2001) and author of several articles about Hume’s moral philosophy
and about the relation between morality and reasons, including “The common
point of view in Hume’s ethics” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1997)
and “The roots of reasons” (Philosophical Review, 2000).
Lorne Falkenstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario.
He is the author of Kant’s Intuitionism and of numerous articles on space and
spatial representation in Hume, Reid, Kant, Berkeley, and Condillac.
viii notes on co ntributors
Don Garrett is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author
of Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy and the editor of The
Cambridge Companion to Spinoza.
Mikael M. Karlsson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland, and
Dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the University of Akureyri. He
is a long-standing member of the Hume Society and has served on its executive
committee and as its Secretary-Treasurer. His recent publications include “Rational
ends: Humean and non-Humean considerations” (Sats – Nordic Journal of
Philosophy, 2000) and “Agency and patiency – back to nature?” (Philosophical
Explorations, 2002).
Jane L. McIntyre is Professor of Philosophy at Cleveland State University and
President of the Hume Society. She has published widely on British philosophy of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, in particular, on the work of David
Hume. Her papers all argue for the centrality of Hume’s account of the passions
to his overall philosophical position.
William Edward Morris is Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Director
of the Program in Cognitive Science at Illinois Wesleyan University. He was an
editor of Hume Studies from 1993 to 2000, and has published extensively on
various aspects of Hume’s philosophy.
Tony Pitson is Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of
Stirling. He has published widely on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment
and is the author of Hume’s Philosophy of the Self (2002).
Wade L. Robison is the Ezra A. Hale Professor of Applied Ethics at the Rochester
Institute of Technology. He is a past president of the Hume Society. His books
include Decisions in Doubt: the Environment and Public Policy (1994) and Ethical
Decision Making in Social Work (2000), with L. Reeser.
Abraham Sesshu Roth is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. He is author of several papers on Hume, including “What was
Hume’s problem with personal identity?” (Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 2000), as well as papers in the philosophy of action, including “Shared
agency and contralateral commitments” (forthcoming in Philosophical Review).
Corliss Gayda Swain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College and
the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Hume Society. She has written numerous
articles on Hume’s metaphysics and moral theory.
Jacqueline Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San
Francisco. She has written numerous articles on Hume’s moral philosophy and on
notes on co ntributors ix
contemporary Humean ethics, including “Hume on the standard of virtue”
(Journal of Ethics, 2002) and “Humean ethics and the politics of sentiment”
(Topoi, 2002).
John P. Wright is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University and
Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of The Sceptical
Realism of David Hume (1983), and co-editor of Hume and Hume’s Connexions
(1994), Psyche and Soma (2000), John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding in Focus (2000), and David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature
(2003).
References to the Treatise,
Abstract, and Enquiries
References to A Treatise of Human Nature (T), An Abstract of A Treatise of
Human Nature (A), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU), and
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM) are to the Oxford
Philosophical Texts editions:
A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary Norton,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, in A Treatise of Human Nature,
edited by David Fate Norton and Mary Norton, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Thomas Beauchamp,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Thomas Beauchamp,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
For the Treatise, citations are by Book, Part, section, and paragraph number in
arabic numerals (the style of the new editions) and also by page number from the
Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition (SBN). A citation to the Treatise will look like:
(T 1.4.2.3; SBN 188–9)
For the Abstract, citations are by paragraph number and by corresponding page
number in the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition. For the Preface to the Abstract, “A
Pref.” is used. Sample citations are:
(A 3; SBN 646)
(A Pref. 1; SBN 643)
For the Enquiries, citations are by section and paragraph number, and by page
number from the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch edition. Sample citations are: