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Georges Dicker Reveals the Contemporary Significance of These Problems by Clearly and Sharply Analyzing Hume’S Reasoning

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Georges Dicker Reveals the Contemporary Significance of These Problems by Clearly and Sharply Analyzing Hume’S Reasoning HUME’S EPISTEMOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS “This is an excellent book. Dicker concentrates squarely on Hume’s central arguments, usefully assessing them as contributions to contemporary philosophical debates. He also pays scrupulous attention to the texts, taking account of recent Hume scholarship but remaining attentive to the needs of inexperienced students.” Professor Gary Iseminger Carleton College Many of the current philosophical problems over meaning, knowledge, causality, and sense perception can be traced to David Hume’s writings in his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume’s Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction provides a clear, concise, and accessible guide to the key themes in Hume’s philosophy Issues discussed include Hume’s argument that there can be no purely rational demonstration of anything’s existence, so that God cannot be proven to exist; that all our scientific knowledge rests on inferences from past experiences that cannot be rationally justified; and that we cannot talk of causality apart from natural science. Georges Dicker reveals the contemporary significance of these problems by clearly and sharply analyzing Hume’s reasoning. Throughout, Hume’s arguments are also placed against a historical background providing us with essential insight into his criticisms of rationalism and his central place as a founder of empiricism. Key features of the book also include discussion of Kant’s responses to Hume and consideration of more recent responses to Hume’s philosophy, allowing the full significance of his thought for contemporary philosophy to emerge. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume’s philosophy for the first time, Hume’s Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction provides an ideal guide to the main themes in his writing. Georges Dicker is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the State University of New York College at Brockport. He is author of Descartes: An Analytical and Historical Introduction (1993), Perceptual Knowledge: An Analytical and Historical Study (1980), and Dewey’s Theory of Knowing (1976). HUME’S EPISTEMOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS An Introduction Georges Dicker London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1998 Georges Dicker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dicker, Georges, 1942– Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics: an introduction/Georges Dicker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-16318-8 (hb: alk. paper). 1. Hume, David, 1711–1776 – Contributions in theory of knowledge. 2. Hume, David, 1711–1776 – Contributions in metaphysics. 3. Knowledge, Theory of – History – 18th century. 4. Metaphysics – History – 18th century. I. Title. B1499.K7D53 1998 192–dc21 97–34891 CIP ISBN 0-415-16318-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-16319-6 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-02071-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17461-5 (Glassbook Format) To Marjorie CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Note on References and Abbreviations xii Introduction 1 1 Hume’s theory of meaning and its implications 5 1 Hume’s theory of impressions and ideas and meaning-empiricism 5 2 Application of Hume’s test for meaning to “substance” and “self” 15 3 An alternative to the substance theory 21 4 Critique of Hume’s bundle theory of the self 31 2 Hume’s theory of knowledge (I): “Hume’s Fork” 35 1 Introduction 35 2 “Relations of ideas” and “matters of fact” 35 3 A modernized version of Hume’s Fork 41 4 A critique of the modernized “Fork” 49 5 Hume’s denials concerning matters of fact 55 3 Hume’s theory of knowledge (II): causal reasoning and the problem of induction 61 1 Introduction 61 2 Hume’s critique of causal reasoning 62 3 The problem of induction 73 4 Hume’s psychological explanation of induction 89 5 Need induction be justified? 91 vii CONTENTS 4 Hume’s theory of causality 99 1 Introduction 99 2 Necessary connection 100 3 Hume’s analysis of causation 110 4 The regularity theory: some objections and replies 116 5 Hume’s critique of the causal principle 133 1 Introduction 133 2 Why the causal principle is neither self-evident nor demonstrable 134 3 Stroud’s critique of Hume’s argument 140 4 Kant’s “answer” to Hume 143 6 The belief in the existence of body 154 1 Introduction 154 2 Three assumptions behind Hume’s account 154 3 The general nature of Hume’s account 161 4 The nature and origin of the belief in the existence of body 163 5 The “vulgar system” and the “philosophical system” 174 6 A criticism of Hume’s account 178 7 A contemporary perspective on Hume’s account 183 8 A Kantian response to scepticism regarding the senses 190 Notes 195 Bibliography 207 Index 211 viii PREFACE The purpose of this book is to present and assess David Hume’s most influential contributions to epistemology and metaphysics in a manner that does not presuppose familiarity with Hume on the reader’s part and yet is sufficiently deep and rigorous to interest more advanced students of his thought. Hume’s influence on contemporary epistemology and metaphysics is second to none; probably no other philosopher of the “modern” period continues to have as much influence on the views actually held by contemporary analytic philosophers as does David Hume. Hume is famous, for example, for arguing that meaningful words must have an empirical reference, so that “substance underlying all of a thing’s perceivable qualities” and “immaterial soul” lack meaning; that there can be no purely rational demonstration of anything’s existence, so that God cannot be proved to exist; that all of our knowledge of scientific laws rests on inferences from experience that are not susceptible of any rational justification; that every claim of the type “A caused B” involves at least one law of nature, so that it is nonsense to talk of cause and effect or causal explanation outside the context of natural science; that the principle that every beginning of existence must have a cause of existence cannot be known a priori; that our belief in objects existing independently of our perceptions of them is highly problematic. Such Humean tenets continue to define the broad parameters of much contemporary philosophy, and must be reckoned with by any thinker who wishes to go outside them. Hume offers his arguments on these and related matters in several key sections of his A Treatise of Human Nature, first published in 1739–40, and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748; those sections are doubtless the Humean texts most frequently encountered by students. One of the chief aims of this book is to analyze and evaluate the arguments contained in those sections, while providing some of the historical background against which they are to be understood. This is worth doing not only because of the intrinsic interest and powerful influence of Hume’s arguments, but also because of Hume’s manner of exposition. Each work is written in such a way that the reader may be hard pressed to break down Hume’s arguments into steps – to analyze them in ways commended by the methods of present-day analytical philosophy. In the youthful Treatise, ix PREFACE Hume’s style is tortuous and complex; in the mature Enquiry, it is so elegant and graceful that the hard muscle and sinews of Hume’s thinking may not be apparent. Throughout this book, therefore, one of my chief aims is to present Hume’s arguments in a manner which is both sufficiently rigorous to bring out their power and yet sufficiently perspicuous to be accessible to non-specialists in the field. I attempt also to provide informed and reasoned assessments of these arguments; in so doing I discuss some Kantian and several contemporary responses to Hume. I should also indicate what this book does not attempt to do. The field of Hume studies is today one of the most active in philosophical scholarship, and in the past two decades there have appeared several excellent books proposing new interpretations of Hume’s overall system of thought. Some major controversies have emerged: for example whether Hume should be seen as an empiricist and sceptic or as a constructive naturalist. Some novel proposals have been made: for example that Hume believed in objective necessary connections between causes and effects. Although I allude to some of these rival interpretations, that is not my main focus in this book. Rather, this book attempts to explain and assess what I take to be Hume’s most influential ideas in epistemology and metaphysics. For, perhaps more than any other philosopher of the great age of philosophy that comprised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hume is a “contemporary” philosopher: his epistemological and metaphysical ideas continue to permeate the current philosophical landscape. It is fitting, then, that an introduction to his epistemology and metaphysics not only guides the reader through the key texts where these ideas are expounded, but also treats them as a living part of ongoing philosophical inquiry. G. D. Brockport, New York July 1997 x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to severanonymous readers for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this book, which led me to make very significant revisions.
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