Wednesday – July 19
Keynote: Matthew Wickman ‘The Modern Spiritual Affect of Perplexed Affirmation, or, The David Hume of R. S. Thomas’
The twentieth-century Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, once short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is remembered as one of the century’s most powerful exponents of spiritual bleakness. For Thomas, a heterodox Anglican priest as well as a poet, the modern world had largely sundered any possibility of meaningful connection with religious tradition or felt sense of closeness to God. And in some poems, Thomas identifies David Hume as a key figure in a western historical narrative of spiritual dereliction. And yet, Hume plays a more nuanced role in Thomas’s cosmology. In particular, the privilege Hume accords to experience informs Thomas’s own spiritual vision, ultimately affirming experiences of the sacred that confound theology, to say nothing of common sense, and yet compellingly anchor personal conviction. In effect, Thomas makes Hume into a figure who defines our modern spiritual zeitgeist, with enigmatic implications for both faith and reason.
Wednesday Concurrent Sessions
1A Speaker: Sam Zahn – ‘Hume, Two Texts, and Two Continua’
Abstract: There has recently arisen more serious investigation into the relationship between Hume’s Treatise and his first Enquiry. For example, Hsueh Qu (2020) has argued that Hume’s epistemology changes significantly between the two works, and that this change is an improvement. In this paper, I chart differences between these works upon two distinct but related continua: a metaphysical/semantic continuum and an epistemological one. I argue that both shifts increase incoherence in Hume’s philosophy, and so the Enquiry is overall a more problematic work. What accounts for Hume’s tolerance of this increased incoherence is that the resultant metaphysics and epistemology of the Enquiry are more effective at combating rationalism and superstition than those of the Treatise.
2A Speaker: Nathan Rockwood – ‘Epistemic Justification in Hume’
What is Hume’s view of epistemic justification? Contemporary epistemologists distinguish between internalism and externalism about the nature of justification. Internalism is, roughly, the view that a belief that p is justified by a mental state (“internal” to the mind), such as the awareness of evidence. By contrast, externalism is, roughly, the view that a belief that p is justified by facts about the belief-forming process (facts that a person may not be aware of, and hence “external” to the mind), such as the reliability of the belief-forming process. In this paper, I argue that neither a fully internalist position nor a fully externalist position adequately captures Hume’s view; rather, both the supporting evidence and the reliability of the belief-forming process explain why we should hold those beliefs, and hence explain why those beliefs are justified. Thus, Hume has a partly internalist, partly externalist view of justification.
3A Speaker: Donald Baxter – ‘Methodizing Hume’s Metaphysics’
One of the sciences comprised in Hume’s Science of Human Nature is metaphysics, understood as the science of the most general features of the world as it appears to us. Hume’s metaphysics in the Treatise can be “methodized, or reduced to general principles” (ST 16, Mil 235-6). Two of the principles are:
(I) The Contradiction Principle: The distinctly conceivable implies no contradiction.
(II) The Possibility Principle: What implies no contradiction is possible.
From these, another principle often mentioned by Hume follows:
(IV) The Conceivability Principle: The distinctly conceivable is possible.
Hume takes for granted another principle that should be made explicit:
(VI) The Impossibility Principle: What implies a contradiction is impossible.
I will discuss these principles and will conclude that for Hume a priori knowledge is based on our experience of our ideas and of how our minds work and therefore that Humean a priori knowledge of the possible and impossible is subject to the causal limitations of our ability to conceive, that is, to form ideas.
3B Speaker: Enrico Galvagni – ‘Pufendorf and Hume on the Nature of Morality’
The common understanding of morality in Hume’s time was of two kinds. On the one hand, rationalist accounts argued that morality is founded on eternal and immutable relations of fitness. On the other hand, voluntarist accounts professed that morality emerges from the imposition of a divine law. In this paper, I show that situating Hume in this context provides us with a better understanding of his ethical views. In section 1, I reconstruct some central aspects of one of the most important voluntarists of the early modern period: Samuel von Pufendorf. In section 2, I showcase two important affinities between Hume’s sentimentalist ethics and Pufendorf’s voluntarist ethics. In section 3, I show how Hume’s naturalistic ethics can be conceived as a secular attempt to recast some fundamental voluntarist commitments.