Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

On McRae's Hume

On McRae's Hume Professor McRae ' s interesting paper may be rather in the naturally divided into two parts. In the first part he ex- plains what he takes Hume's account of time to be; second he advances the bold thesis that Hume's account of time, or perhaps of duration, provides a basis or foundation for his more widely discussed remarks on identity, substance, the self, the necessary connections. In what follows I first reconstruct Professor McRae' s paper, and then I raise some problems, perhaps puzzles, about Hume's view on duration, time and fictions. According to McRae, some philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) distinguish between time and duration, both of which are taken to be perfectly legitimate notions. Hume, by contrast, takes time and duration to be the same, viz. , a succession of moments. What philosophers and the vulgar call 'duration' is something quite different, namely a single unbroken stretch of time which is not composed of successive parts. Of duration taken in this latter way, McRae says, Hume has four things to say, all of them negative: (1) we have no idea of duration; (2) no object and has duration; (3) there is no such thing as duration; (4) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Hume Studies Hume Society

Loading next page...
 
/lp/hume-society/on-mcrae-s-hume-B0kNlAtgaX

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Hume Society
Copyright
Copyright © Hume Society
ISSN
1947-9921
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Professor McRae ' s interesting paper may be rather in the naturally divided into two parts. In the first part he ex- plains what he takes Hume's account of time to be; second he advances the bold thesis that Hume's account of time, or perhaps of duration, provides a basis or foundation for his more widely discussed remarks on identity, substance, the self, the necessary connections. In what follows I first reconstruct Professor McRae' s paper, and then I raise some problems, perhaps puzzles, about Hume's view on duration, time and fictions. According to McRae, some philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) distinguish between time and duration, both of which are taken to be perfectly legitimate notions. Hume, by contrast, takes time and duration to be the same, viz. , a succession of moments. What philosophers and the vulgar call 'duration' is something quite different, namely a single unbroken stretch of time which is not composed of successive parts. Of duration taken in this latter way, McRae says, Hume has four things to say, all of them negative: (1) we have no idea of duration; (2) no object and has duration; (3) there is no such thing as duration; (4)

Journal

Hume StudiesHume Society

Published: Jan 26, 1981

There are no references for this article.