Hume Studies

Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate re­sponses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s account of responsibility. I argue this on the grounds that without reference to the passions, Hume does not have the resources to distinguish between responsible and non-responsible entities. Instead, I attribute to Hume a distinctive, sympathy-based response-dependent conception of responsibility.

In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume argues that there is a significant problem with his earlier account of personal identity. There has been considerable debate about what this problem actually is. I develop a new version of an internal inconsistency reading, where I argue that Hume realised that his original account of the connexion between perceptions in terms of an association of the ideas of the perceptions was not a viable means of explaining the connexion between perceptions as it leads to an infinite regress of ideas of perceptions. This is only stopped by accepting that the mind perceives a connexion between perceptions. This, however, is something Hume cannot accept. As a result, Hume is left without a positive account of the self, as he has no account of the connexion between perceptions.

In this paper, I show how reading Hume’s moral philosophy in light of seminal works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American authors can provide resources for developing a richer and more intentionally relational conception of sympathy. I begin by identifying two phenomena to which African-American intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Anna Julia Cooper refer with the term “sympathy.” For ease of reference, I label these phenomena “sympathetic commitment” and “sympathetic understanding,” respectively. I then show that there are concepts in Hume’s moral philosophy that pick out similar phenomena and suggest that Hume scholars can draw on these concepts to develop an enriched and distinctively Humean sense of sympathy.

Louis Loeb has identified a “nasty problem” in connection with Hume’s theory of meaning. The problem is that Hume seemingly claims we lack ideas corresponding to key metaphysical terms, such as “substance” and “necessary connection,” but he then proceeds to explain why philosophers believe in the existence of entities denoted by such terms. In short, Hume seems motivated to explain belief in the existence of certain entities, despite his claiming we have no idea of them. In this paper, I strive to solve the problem by noting the important role of clear and distinct perception in his thought. In particular, I argue Hume only wishes to deny we have a clear and distinct idea of substance and necessary connection, and not that we altogether lack an idea of substance and necessary connection, traditionally conceived.

In this piece, I argue that Hume wrote his Essays to continue writing on political issues after he rather abruptly ended his Treatise, Book 3. Initially he wrote some essays in the vein of Addison and Steele, but he rejected these essays as “frivolous.” In writing on political issues, he became a master essayist and his essays withstood the test of time. “Political” should here be taken in the wider sense as topical issues which readers could immediately recognize as being relevant.