Hume's Reason
David Owen
Abstract
Reason plays a central role in Hume's account of human understanding but just what that role is is a matter of continuing controversy. Many of the most famous problems that Hume discusses, and many of the positions he advocates, are expressed in terms of reason. It is central to his arguments about induction, belief, scepticism, the passions, and moral distinctions. Hume's Reason provides a new look at Hume's account of reason and discusses the first three of the aforementioned issues. Hume's theory is introduced by looking at the logic of ideas developed by Descartes and Locke. Hume followed ... More
Reason plays a central role in Hume's account of human understanding but just what that role is is a matter of continuing controversy. Many of the most famous problems that Hume discusses, and many of the positions he advocates, are expressed in terms of reason. It is central to his arguments about induction, belief, scepticism, the passions, and moral distinctions. Hume's Reason provides a new look at Hume's account of reason and discusses the first three of the aforementioned issues. Hume's theory is introduced by looking at the logic of ideas developed by Descartes and Locke. Hume followed them in rejecting a formal, deductive account of the workings of the inferential faculty of reason. His account of demonstration is similar to their treatment. But he went farther, in what we now call the argument concerning induction, by showing that no account of reason as a separate faculty could explain our inferences to beliefs in the unobserved. Hume offers instead an associationist account of probable reasoning and a new account of belief. In the process, the picture of reason as an independent faculty is replaced by an explanation of reasoning in terms of properties of the imagination.
Keywords:
belief,
deduction,
history of philosophy,
Hume,
imagination,
induction,
inference,
David Owen,
passions,
philosophy of mind,
reason,
reasoning,
scepticism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2002 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199252602 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 |
DOI:10.1093/0199252602.001.0001 |
