Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects

Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects

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  • Author: Stefanie Rocknak
  • Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
  • ISBN: 9400721862
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 300

This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume’s conception of objects in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, Rocknak shows that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. But, she argues, he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believed that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On the other hand, he thought that we only imagine such causes when we reach a “philosophical” level of thought. This tension manifests itself in Hume’s account of personal identity; a tension that, Rocknak argues, Hume acknowledges in the Appendix to the Treatise. As a result of Rocknak’s detailed account of Hume’s conception of objects, we are forced to accommodate new interpretations of, at least, Hume’s notions of belief, personal identity, justification and causality.


Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects

Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects

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  • Author: Stefanie Rocknak
  • Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
  • ISBN: 9400721870
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 292

This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume’s conception of objects in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, Rocknak shows that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. But, she argues, he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believed that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On the other hand, he thought that we only imagine such causes when we reach a “philosophical” level of thought. This tension manifests itself in Hume’s account of personal identity; a tension that, Rocknak argues, Hume acknowledges in the Appendix to the Treatise. As a result of Rocknak’s detailed account of Hume’s conception of objects, we are forced to accommodate new interpretations of, at least, Hume’s notions of belief, personal identity, justification and causality.


Hume’s Theory of Imagination

Hume’s Theory of Imagination

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  • Author: Jan Wilbanks
  • Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
  • ISBN: 9401507090
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 187

The present work is, as its title indicates, a study of Hume's theory of imagination. Naturally, it is a study of a particular sort. It has a certain scope and limitations, takes a certain line of approach, exhibits certain emphases, has certain ends-in-view, etc. As an initial step in specifying the nature of this study, I shall indicate its central problem, i. e. , that problem to the solution of which the solutions of the various other problems with which it is concerned are merely means. The central problem of this study is that of determining how Hume's theory of im agination is related to, or involved in, the generic features and main lines of argument of his philosophy of the human understanding. The expression "philosophy of the human understanding" is obvious to allude to a restriction on the scope of this investigation. ly intended Actually, it is a title suggested to me by two of Hume's philosophical writings; and to anyone who is even modestly acquainted with these writings, its reference should be no mystery. Hume published the first two so-called "Books" of his A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. The first of these two Books was entitled "Of the Human Understanding. " Nine years later, he published a work under the title, An Enquiry Con cerning Human Understanding.


The Imagination in Spinoza and Hume

The Imagination in Spinoza and Hume

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  • Author: Willard Clark Gore
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Imagination
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 92


Imagination in Hume's Philosophy

Imagination in Hume's Philosophy

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  • Author: Timothy M. Costelloe
  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • ISBN: 1474436412
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 312

Defines the cutting-edge of scholarship on ancient Greek history employing methods from social science


The Imagination in Spinoza and Hume

The Imagination in Spinoza and Hume

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  • Author: Willard Clark Gore
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Imagination
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 90


Hume's Theory of Consciousness

Hume's Theory of Consciousness

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  • Author: Wayne Waxman
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 9780521541183
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 368

A comprehensive analysis and re-evaluation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.


Custom and Reason in Hume

Custom and Reason in Hume

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  • Author: Henry E. Allison
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford
  • ISBN: 0191615528
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 426

Henry Allison examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology, as contained in the Treatise of Human Nature. Allison takes a distinctive two-level approach. On the one hand, he considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the "space of reasons." On the other hand, Allison provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to a version of the perceptual model, according to which the paradigm of knowledge is a seeing with the "mind's eye" of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data, Whereas regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgment.


David Hume's Theory of Mind

David Hume's Theory of Mind

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  • Author: Daniel E. Flage
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 0429640048
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 208

This book, first published in 1990, is a detailed examination of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. It shows that the theory of mind developed in the Trestise is a thread which ties together many of the seemingly unrelated philosophical issues discussed in the work. Hume’s primary objective was to defend a ‘bundle theory’ of mind, and, through a close examination of the texts, this book provides a thorough account of how Hume understood this theory and the problems he discovered with it.


Hume's Imagination

Hume's Imagination

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  • Author: Tito Magri
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0192679112
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 511

This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the mental nature, function and structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1, 'Of the Understanding', of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume's philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blindspot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume's philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume's imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of idea, which complements our sensible representations of objects. Our cognitive nature, if restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume's naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content, and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.