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

Learn More →

The Surprise Twist in Hume's Treatise

The Surprise Twist in Hume's Treatise Abstract: A Treatise of Human Nature opens with ambitious hopes for the science of man, but Hume eventually launches into a series of skeptical arguments that culminates in a report of radical skeptical despair. This essay is a preliminary exploration of how to interpret this surprising development. I first distinguish two kinds of surprise twist: those that are incompatible with some preceding portion of the work, and those that are not. This suggests two corresponding pictures of Hume. On one picture, he believed the skeptical development to be at odds with something in early Treatise ; on the other, he took these two portions of Book 1 to be perfectly compatible. After defending the claim that Hume endorsed both of these portions, I sketch two promising interpretations—a "perspectivist," incompatibilist interpretation and a "post-skeptical," compatibilist interpretation—and offer some reasons to favor the latter view. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Hume Studies Hume Society

The Surprise Twist in Hume's Treatise

Hume Studies , Volume 35 (1) – Dec 1, 2009

Loading next page...
 
/lp/hume-society/the-surprise-twist-in-hume-s-treatise-ZucMsH6YEx

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

Abstract: A Treatise of Human Nature opens with ambitious hopes for the science of man, but Hume eventually launches into a series of skeptical arguments that culminates in a report of radical skeptical despair. This essay is a preliminary exploration of how to interpret this surprising development. I first distinguish two kinds of surprise twist: those that are incompatible with some preceding portion of the work, and those that are not. This suggests two corresponding pictures of Hume. On one picture, he believed the skeptical development to be at odds with something in early Treatise ; on the other, he took these two portions of Book 1 to be perfectly compatible. After defending the claim that Hume endorsed both of these portions, I sketch two promising interpretations—a "perspectivist," incompatibilist interpretation and a "post-skeptical," compatibilist interpretation—and offer some reasons to favor the latter view.

Journal

Hume StudiesHume Society

Published: Dec 1, 2009

There are no references for this article.