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A premise of the Leibnizian cosmological argument from contingency says that no contingent fact can explain why there are any contingent facts at all. David Hume and Paul Edwards famously denied this premise, arguing that if every fact has an explanation in terms of further facts ad infinitum, then they all do. This is known as the Hume–Edwards Principle (HEP). In this paper, I examine the cosmological argument from contingency within a framework of metaphysical explanation or ground and defend a ground-theoretic version of HEP which says, roughly, that the plurality of contingent facts is grounded in its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do we have social norms—of fairness, cooperation, trust, property, or gender? Modern-day Humeans, as I call them, believe these norms are best accounted for in cultural evolutionary terms, as adaptive solutions to recurrent problems of social interaction. In this paper, I discuss a challenge to this "Humean Program." Social norms involve widespread behaviors, but also distinctive psychological attitudes and dispositions. According to the challenge, Humean accounts of norms leave their psychological side unexplained. They explain, say, why we share equally, but not why we disapprove of those who don't. I defend the Humean Program against this challenge. In particular, I suggest an idea for how to extend the Program to account for the psychological side of norms. Socially adaptive behaviors aren't just likely to emerge in a group; They are also likely to be widely taught within it. The transmission of these behaviors through instruction explains why they are associated with distinctive normative attitudes and dispositions. These attitudes play a pedagogical role in helping transmit these behaviors to children and newcomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Hume's skeptical solution to the problem of induction was grounded in his belief that we learn by means of custom. We consider here how a form of reinforcement learning like custom may allow an agent to learn how to learn in other ways as well. Specifically, an agent may learn by simple reinforcement to adopt new forms of learning that work better than simple reinforcement in the context of specific tasks. We will consider how such a bootstrapping process may lead to a system that includes trial-and-error forms of learning like win-stay/lose-shift, probe and adjust, and simple reinforcement itself together with higher-rationality inferential tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we account for the extraordinary regularity in the world? Humeans and Non-Humeans sharply disagree. According to Non-Humeans, the world behaves in an extraordinarily regular way because of certain necessary connections in nature. However, Humeans have thought that Non-Humean views are metaphysically objectionable. In particular, there are two general metaphysical principles that Humeans have found attractive that are incompatible with all existing versions of Non-Humeanism. My goal in this paper is to develop a novel version of Non-Humeanism that is consistent with (and even entails) both of these general metaphysical principles. By endorsing such a view, one can have the explanatory benefits of Non-Humeanism while at the same time avoiding two of the major metaphysical objections towards Non-Humeanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humean accounts of natural law have long been charged with being unable to account for the laws' explanatory power in science. One form of this objection is to charge Humean accounts with explanatory circularity: a fact in the Humean mosaic helps to explain why some regularity is a law (first premise), but that law, in turn, helps to explain why that mosaic fact holds (second premise). To this objection, Humeans have replied that the explanation in the first premise is metaphysical whereas the explanation in the second premise is scientific, so (since these two varieties of explanation operate very differently) the two explanations cannot be chained together to yield explanatory circularity. This paper presents a new circularity argument that avoids this objection because both explanations in the premises are metaphysical. The new circularity argument also avoids the objection that the contrasts at the point where the two explanations are chained together fail to line up properly. The upshot is to leave the Humean account of law with two unattractive options: to regard scientific explanation under natural law as not constituting genuine explanation at all or to regard the Humean account as involving a vicious explanatory circularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the literary criticism of the books "Treatise of Human Nature" and "Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding & Concerning the Principles of Morals" by David Hume. It reviews the work as the greatest justice-as-mutual-advantage theorists and vulnerability objection which is considered judgment regarding justice.

Humeans are often accused of positing laws which fail to explain or are involved in explanatory circularity. Here, I will argue that these arguments are confused, but not because of anything to do with Humeanism: rather, they rest on false assumptions about causal explanation. I'll show how these arguments can be neatly sidestepped if one takes on two plausible commitments which are motivated independently of Humeanism: first, that laws don't directly feature in scientific explanation (a view defended recently by Ruben in R Inst Philos Suppl 27:95–117, 1990, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246100005063 and Skow in Reasons why, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) and second, the view that explanation is contrastive. After outlining and motivating these views, I show how they bear on explanation-based arguments against Humeanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given reductionism about people, personal persistence must fundamentally consist in some kind of impersonal continuity relation. Typically, these continuity relations can hold from one to many. And, if they can, the analysis of personal persistence must include a non-branching clause to avoid non-transitive identities or multiple occupancy. It is far from obvious, however, what form this clause should take. This paper argues that previous accounts are inadequate and develops a new proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on parallels in Hutcheson and Hume, I raise two worries about Bratman's theory of shared agency. First, has Bratman captured the interpersonal character of shared agency? Second, has he captured its practical character? By 'its practical character,' I mean the sense in which shared agency is something we can undertake under that description, and not just a condition we might happen to find ourselves in? I argue that Bratman's theory falls short of answering this second worry. The source of the shortcoming, I argue, is a fundamental methodological commitment that structures his action theory as a whole. This is the commitment to regard the concepts of action and shared action as empirical concepts, rather than as practical concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtue ethical theories typically follow a neo-Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian model, making use of various combinations of key features of the Aristotelian model including eudaimonism (the notion that virtue is a necessary component of individual flourishing), perfectionism (the idea that the truly virtuous agent achieves a sort of moral perfection), an account of practical wisdom, and the thesis of the unity of the virtues (roughly, that the virtues form a unified set and are mutually realized). In this paper I motivate what I call a Humean virtue ethic, which is a deeply particularist account of virtue that rejects all of these central tenets, at least in their traditional forms. Focusing on three factors by which Hume determines virtue, I show that this view of virtue resonates with the aims of the moral particularist, who holds that there are no general moral principles and that right action is determined only with reference to context and on a case-by-case basis. I use Hume's texts to introduce and motivate three claims, which I find plausible, and which I will show can be read together as entailing an interesting and underappreciated picture of virtue that is also able to solve an important dilemma for particularist virtue ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inoffensive title of Section 1.4.7 of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, 'Conclusion of this Book', belies the convoluted treatment of scepticism contained within. It is notoriously difficult to decipher Hume's considered response to scepticism in this section, or whether he even has one. In recent years, however, one line of interpretation has gained popularity in the literature. The 'usefulness and agreeableness reading' (henceforth U&A) interprets Hume as arguing in THN 1.4.7 that our beliefs and/or epistemic policies are justified via their usefulness and agreeableness to the self and others; proponents include Ardal (in Livingston & King (eds.) Hume: a re-evaluation, ), Kail (in: Frasca-Spada & Kail (eds.) Impressions of Hume, ), McCormick (Hume Stud 31:1, ), Owen (Hume's reason, ), and Ridge (Hume Stud 29:2, ), while Schafer (Philosophers, forthcoming) also defends an interpretation along these lines. In this paper, I will argue that although U&A has textual merit, it struggles to maintain a substantive distinction between epistemic and moral justification-a distinction that Hume insists on. I then attempt to carve out the logical space for there being a distinctly epistemic notion of justification founded on usefulness and agreeableness. However, I find that such an account is problematic for two reasons: first, it cannot take advantage of the textual support for U&A; secondly, it is incompatible with other features of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the treatment of the issue of time and identity, by the philosopher David Hume. It is stated that though the concept of self is central to Humes's theories of self and external world, it has been misunderstood or neglected. Speaking about a book on the said issue by the author, it is commented that there is a difficulty concerning identity which is original with Hume, a problem, which is real crucial and remains unsolved today.

The article presents a discussion on the treatment of the issue of identity, by the philosophers David Hume and Gottlob Frege in their respective works. The author comments on the element of uncertainty, that both the authors associate with identity. While Hume considers that identity can be difficult to be ascertained even by using multiple concepts, Frege reportedly considers that identity gives rise to challenging problems.

The article presents a discussion on the issue of identity and time, as seen in the works of the philosopher David Hume. It is reported that, Hume's work on identity was appreciated, only when it was extensively discussed by the author Donald Baxter. In his publications, Baxter reportedly scrutinizes, criticizes and further elaborates Hume's treatment of the issue.

The two dogmas at issue are the Humean dogma that “‘is’ statements do not imply ‘ought’ statements” and the Kantian dogma that “‘ought’ statements imply ‘can’” statements. The extant literature concludes these logically contradict each other. On the contrary, it is argued here that while there is no derivable formal contradiction, the juxtaposition of the dogmas manifests a philosophical disagreement over how to understand the logic of prescriptions. This disagreement bears on how to understand current metaethical debate between realists and non-realists about morality in a way not heretofore investigated. The conclusion is that realists have the resources to account for both dogmas, while non-realists, if they strictly adhere to the “is”/“ought” gap, cannot give an adequate account of why “ought” implies “can”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many solutions of the Goodman paradox have been proposed but so far no agreement has been reached about which is the correct solution. However, I will not contribute here to the discussion with a new solution. Rather, I will argue that a solution has been in front of us for more than two hundred years because a careful reading of Hume’s account of inductive inferences shows that, contrary to Goodman’s opinion, it embodies a correct solution of the paradox. Moreover, the account even includes a correct answer to Mill’s question of why in some cases a single instance is sufficient for a complete induction, since Hume gives a well-supported explanation of this reliability phenomenon. The discussion also suggests that Bayesian theory by itself cannot explain this phenomenon. Finally, we will see that Hume’s explanation of the reliability phenomenon is surprisingly similar to the explanation given lately by a number of naturalistic philosophers in their discussion of the Goodman paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the philosophy of David Hume. Books published by Hume; Distinct style of Hume's reasoning; Ways by which Hume’s dilemma forces readers to choose between the trivial and the general and more established properties of the imagination; Effect of the instability, potential inconsistency and indiscriminate character of an individual's position on the person's long-term goals, plans and strategies; Hume's argument that people are saved from subversion only by the fact that they have difficulty taking the remote views that the understanding would require of them.

The article discusses the author’s interpretation of the identity puzzle presented by philosopher David Hume. Philosopher Gottlob Frege is also cited as the creator of a puzzle similar to Hume’s. The author concludes that the solution to Frege’s puzzle is not sufficient to solve Hume’s identity puzzle.

The article focuses on the literary work "Dialogue," by D. Hume in order to analyze his views on cultural conflicts of values. The account of cultural conflicts of values that Hume offers in this short piece is far more complex than either of these contrary declarations suggest. A careful analysis of the literary piece shows that a rather interesting sort of pluralism is built into the very structure of the account of cultural conflicts of values Hume presents in this work. The analysis shows that the standard of morals at the heart of Hume's ethics allows him to justify a complex and interestingly pluralist account of cultural conflicts of values.