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Author: Georges Dicker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134714246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking.
Author: Georges Dicker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134714246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are amongst the most widely-studies texts on philosophy. Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction presents in a clear, concise and accessible manner the key themes of these texts. Georges Dicker clarifies Hume's views on meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception step by step and provides us with a sharp picture of how philosophical thinking has been influenced by Hume. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics is an indispensible guide to Hume's philosophical thinking.
Author: Frederick F. Schmitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199683115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
Frederick F. Schmitt offers a new account of Hume's epistemology in A Treatise of Human Nature, which alternately manifests scepticism, empiricism, and naturalism. Critics have emphasised one of these positions over the others, but Schmitt argues that they can be reconciled by tracing them to an underlying epistemology of knowledge and probability.
Author: Louis E. Loeb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198033508
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
David 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.
Author: Hsueh M. Qu
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190066296
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
"Here is a central issue in Hume scholarship: what is the relationship between Hume's early Treatise of Human Nature and his later Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding? Is the Enquiry a mere simplified restatement of the contents of the Treatise, or do the two substantially differ? Here is another critical issue in Hume scholarship: what is the relationship between Hume's scepticism and his naturalism? How can we reconcile Hume's extreme brand of scepticism with his positive ambitions of providing an account of human nature? Hume's Epistemological Evolution argues that these two issues are intimately related. In particular, this book argues that Hume's Enquiry indeed differs from the Treatise, precisely because he changes his response to scepticism between the two works. Because the Treatise has as its primary focus the psychological naturalistic project, its treatment of epistemological issues arises unsystematically from the psychological investigation. Consequently, Hume finds himself forced into an unsatisfactory response to scepticism founded on the Title Principle (THN 1.4.7.11). However, this response is deeply problematic, as Hume himself seems to recognise. In contrast to the Treatise, the Enquiry emphasises the epistemological aspects of Hume's project, and offers a radically different and more sophisticated epistemology. This framework addresses the weaknesses of the earlier one, and also constitutes a 'compleat answer' to two of his most prominent critics, Thomas Reid and James Beattie. Hume's epistemology thus undergoes an evolution between these two works"--
Author: Henry E. Allison
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191615528
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Henry Allison examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology, as contained in the Treatise of Human Nature. Allison takes a distinctive two-level approach. On the one hand, he considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the "space of reasons." On the other hand, Allison provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to a version of the perceptual model, according to which the paradigm of knowledge is a seeing with the "mind's eye" of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data, Whereas regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgment.
Author: Robert J. Fogelin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042959030X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
This work, first published in 1985, offers a general interpretation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. Most Hume scholarship has either neglected or downplayed an important aspect of Hume’s position – his scepticism. This book puts that right, examining in close detail the sceptical arguments in Hume’s philosophy.
Author: David Hume
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014190464X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
One of the most significant works of Western philosophy, Hume's Treatise was published in 1739-40, before he was thirty years old. A pinnacle of English empiricism, it is a comprehensive attempt to apply scientific methods of observation to a study of human nature, and a vigorous attack upon the principles of traditional metaphysical thought. With masterly eloquence, Hume denies the immortality of the soul and the reality of space; considers the manner in which we form concepts of identity, cause and effect; and speculates upon the nature of freedom, virtue and emotion. Opposed both to metaphysics and to rationalism, Hume's philosophy of informed scepticism sees man not as a religious creation, nor as a machine, but as a creature dominated by sentiment, passion and appetite.
Author: K. Meeker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137025557
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Treating David Hume as a partner in a continuing philosophical dialogue, this book tries to come to terms with Hume's influential thoughts on scepticism and naturalism in a way that sheds light on contemporary philosophy and its relationship to science.
Author: Bredo Johnsen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190662778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
David Hume launched a historic revolution in epistemology when he showed that our theories about the world have no probability relative to what we think of as our evidence for them, hence that the distinction between justified and unjustified theories does not lie in their different probabilities relative to that evidence. However, allies in his revolution appeared only in the 20th century, in the persons of Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine. Hume's second great contribution to the field, which remains unrecognized to this day, was to propose what is now known as reflective equilibrium theory as the framework within which justified and unjustified theories are rightly distinguished. The core of this book comprises an account of these developments from Hume to Quine, an extension of reflective equilibrium theory that renders it a general theory of epistemic justification concerning our beliefs about the world, and an argument that all four of these thinkers would have endorsed that extension. In chapters on Sextus, Descartes, Wittgenstein's On Certainty, and other aspects of Hume's epistemology I defend new readings of those philosophers' writings on skepticism and note significant relationships among their views on matters bearing on the Humean revolution. Finally, in chapters on Hilary Putnam's Brains in a Vat and Fred Dretske's contextualism - the only promising version of that view - I show that both fail to rule out the possible truth of radical skeptical hypotheses. This is not surprising, since those hypotheses are in fact possible. They are not, however, of any epistemological significance, since the justification of our beliefs about the world is a function of the extent to which bodies of beliefs to which they belong are in reflective equilibrium, and no extant conception of knowledge is of any epistemological interest.
Author: Oliver A. Johnson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252021565
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
