Hume Studies

One of the gravest charges that has been brought against Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” is that of circularity. Hume is accused of defining good art in terms of “true judges,” and of defining true judges in terms of their ability to judge good art. First, I argue that Hume avoids circularity since he offers a way of identifying good art that is logically independent of the verdict of true judges. Second, I argue that this clarifies an enduring puzzle in the scholarship on Hume’s essay: why he appears to offer not one, but two standards of taste. Hume’s standard does not consist of general rules; however, Hume needs general rules to establish that some individuals’ tastes are more “delicate” than others’.

This paper claims that Hume is committed to a rather sophisticated form of functionalism. This claim is based upon the following arguments: first, Hume’s charac­terization of objects such as vegetables and animal bodies in terms of their functional identity, and their underlying analogy with the identity we ascribe to persons or selves, implies that an absolute constancy is not part of the essential nature of persons. Rather, what corresponds to this assumed metaphysical constancy is functional identity. Second, Hume’s distinction between the question concerning the substance of the mind on the one hand, and the questions concerning the local conjunction and cause of our perceptions, on the other, has much in common with, and anticipates, the much-celebrated functionalist distinction between the ontology and metaphysics of the mind.

What is Hume’s hypothesis of the double relation of impressions and ideas from which a passion arises? How does it operate in structuring his system? These are primary questions that need to be answered in order to understand Hume’s intention in the Treatise. Yet, there exists no reasonable answers, nor serious attempts to answer them, probably because this hypothesis is considered as a limited issue, relevant only to the indirect passions, or because it is too mechanical and unsophisticated to excite critics’ curiosities. My present aim is to show that Hume’s double relation of impressions and ideas operating in the production of indirect passions is integral to his entire system not only in that it serves as a powerful weapon to advocate his naturalistic position, but also in that it is a highly sophisticated psychological mechanism that functions as a schema for the cooperation of the imagination and the passions.

The purpose of Hume’s argument about induction, contra “literalist” interpreta­tions that see it merely as psychology, is to show that induction cannot be justified. Hume maintains that the only way to justify induction would be to demonstrate or to produce a good inductive argument for the uniformity principle (UP). His most famous point is that any attempt to justify UP inductively would be circular. One may retort that no inductive argument can be circular, for a circular argument must be deductively valid. But there is a sense in which a purely inductive argument for UP is circular: it uses induction for the purpose of justifying induction. Therefore, the literalist interpretation cannot be right. For if the argument can be circular only if its purpose is to justify induction, and Hume has shown that it is circular, then its purpose must be to justify induction, and Hume shows that this cannot be done.

The question broached in the title may sound odd. It makes sense to ask whether Hume’s empiricism is successful, and whether it is the best way of rendering rigorous the (vague) empiricist view. But is it not obvious that Hume is an empiricist? I shall argue that the answer is negative, at least when we are concerned with method­ological empiricism, pertaining to the way inquiry, both scientific and philosophical, must proceed. In support of my claim, I will distinguish between the theoretical ques­tion, pertaining to the methodological view Hume endorses, and the practical ques­tion, concerned with the way he conducts his inquiry. My conclusion will be that the answer to the first question is contentious, and the answer to the second is negative.

Hume described himself as an Academic skeptic and aligned himself with the skepticism of Socrates and Cicero. I argue, though, that Hume transformed the meaning of Academic skepticism by associating it with an experimental rather than dialectical method. In this essay, I distinguish between those aspects of Cicero’s Academic skepticism that Hume adopted and those he discarded in his presentation of mitigated skepticism in the first Enquiry. I then consider the implications of Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism for Hume’s polite eloquence in the Essays, particularly the essays on happi­ness, which are often described as possessing “Ciceronian” and “dialectical” elements. Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism is essential to helping readers understand not only Hume’s alleged neo-Hellenism, but also the aims of his philosophical project.

Hume’s theory of pride has been dismissed due to the contingent relation between passion and object. But why did Hume state the theory as he did? Why did he give two accounts of pride, one holistic and one atomistic? This paper considers Hume’s reasons for giving two accounts, and how he unified them. The holistic account enables Hume to explain how moral distinctions are made, whereas the atomistic allows him to anchor morality in human nature. The accounts are unified by the distinction of feeling pride and being proud: a steady passion of pride would not count as that if it did not contain feelings of pride identified by their introspective quality, and would not be a state of pride without the causal relation of ideas.

I suggest that Hume’s recantation, in the Appendix to the Treatise, of his ac­count of the idea of personal identity in section 1.4.6 hinges on the contrast between the first-personal cognitive roles of that idea and its imagination-based explanation. In stark, if implicit, contrast with Locke, Hume’s account divorces personal identity from consciousness, considering oneself as oneself. But, later in the Appendix, Hume realized, if imperfectly, that something was missing from the idea of self he had constructed. I suggest that what is missing is the intimate consciousness of ourselves that idea should allow us to achieve. While Hume despaired to find a solution to this problem, a change in the background of his earlier theory—a change he had available and which is perhaps alluded to in a letter to Kames—could have made his original account consistent with the first-personal features of the idea of self.

In this paper I argue that Hume’s decision to include an account of curiosity within his theory of the passions is what gives Book 2 of the Treatise its distinctive shape, in which an account of what Hume calls “indirect” passions precedes an account of the nature of the will, which is itself followed by an account of the “direct” passions, then curiosity. On my reading, Hume concludes his theory of the passions with an account of curiosity because this is where it ought to go, given how Hume understands the love of truth to arise in human nature. Not only this, but I contend that Hume’s need to account for the nature of curiosity within his theory of the passions can explain his decision to open Book 2 with a discussion of the indirect passions, rather than the direct passions.