Thursday – July 20
Panel on An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
Jackie Taylor
Lorraine Besser
Aaron Garrett
Thursday Concurrent Sessions
4A Speaker: David Landy – ‘Shepherd on Reason and Abstraction’
Mary Shepherd undertakes to demonstrate that Hume’s radical conclusions are fundamentally misguided by arguing that in taking for granted that thinking begins with mere sensible qualities, Hume misunderstands human mental representation. Shepherd, by contrast, holds that such representation begins with what she calls perception, which is a unity of sensible qualities and reason. Thus, Shepherd puts reason at the very core of her response to her predecessors, and understanding what she means by ‘reason’ is an important part of understanding her philosophical system as a whole. I argue that a careful examination of her texts yields a univocal account of reason. Shepherd’s considered view is that perception represents objects as standing in (primarily causal) relations to each other, and reason is perception itself considered as representing these relations as opposed to the their relata. For Hume, to perceive is merely to have an impression, and to reason is to perform a mental operation on impressions. For Shepherd, sensible qualities and reason are only nominally separable. To perceive is to take one object to be the cause of another. We simply see that objects are related as cause and effect (in veridical perception). Reason is not really distinct from the senses.
4B Speaker: Xiao Qi – ‘Philosophers, The Vulgar, and Hume on the Fictitious Willing of Obligation
in Promising’
In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume claims that we suppose the morality of promises as dependent on a specific mental act, that is, a willing of obligation. However, he also maintains that this act is fictitious and lacks genuine existence. While some scholars find this passage problematic for Hume’s account of promises, I argue in this paper that it merely reflects Hume’s observation of commonsensical opinions and does not undermine the actual origin and ground of promissory obligations. I depart from interpreters who share a similar view by contending that this fictitious mental act is invented to serve as an alleged ‘natural cause’ for promissory obligations, rather than a ‘natural motive’ that they require. This fiction arises due to a tension between the commonsensical understanding of the causal origin of such obligations and their actual, conventional origin. Furthermore, this fiction is produced by a psychological mechanism similar to that which underlies the fiction of the continued existence of sensible objects when their perceptions are interrupted.
5A Speaker: Tom Holden – ‘Hume on Probability and Necessity’
I argue that (i) Hume regards judgments about the probabilities of possible matters of fact as continuous with judgments about their causal necessitation, different in degree but not fundamentally different in kind. I also argue that (ii), on Hume’s account, judgments about the probabilities of possible matters of facts do not represent, depict, or describe anything, but rather express a kind of qualified inferential disposition that we form in light of the evidence presented by experience. Taken together, these two theses provide us with a new argument in favor of the expressivist interpretation of Hume on causal necessity or power.
5B Speaker: Eduardo Andrade – ‘Beyond the Contagion and Projection Divide: Recasting the distinction between Hume’s and Smith’s account of Sympathy’
In a 2006 essay, David Raynor claimed that Adam Smith’s conception of sympathy is but an “abridgment” of Hume’s mechanics of sympathy and that Smith’s target in the opening of the TMS is not Hume, but the “naive readers who implicitly, but mistakenly, think that sympathy is like telepathy”. Recent literature, however, has treated their accounts as diverging in important ways. Fleischacker has given the most incisive account of the differences between their versions of sympathy. According to him, Smith’s holds a projection account of sympathy, while Hume maintains a contagion account.
In this paper, I want to question the projection vs contagion distinction by defending the view that Hume’s sympathetic imagination can be projective. Further, in my view, the distinction between Hume’s and Smith’s account is better cast as a difference between projection (Hume) and introjection (Smith). Finally, against Fleischacker’s proposal that Smith posits a “private access problem” against Hume’s view of sympathy, I want to suggest that the differences between their accounts stem from diverging strategies to counter the objection that sympathy might be self-centered, thus liable to be reduced to self-love.