Humean passions are of, for or about things – that is, they are intentional. However, Hume is also taken to claim, in a famous passage of A Treatise of Human Nature, that the passions do not represent anything (THN 2.3.3.5). Hume’s views in 2.3.3.5, and his views on intentionality of the passions, have been interpreted to be in tension with each another (Kenny 2003, Penelhum 1993, Cohon and Owe...

This article discusses Sen’s critique of the behavioral implications of revealed preference theory. Sen proposes the concept of commitment as a way to account for the possibility of counter-preferential choice. More generally, it is part of an argument against the thesis that rationality may be reduced to some criteria of internal consistency of choices. The main purpose of this paper is to sho...

David Lewis [1988, 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the ‘Desire-as-Belief Thesis’. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis’. We explore ways of being antiHumean that evade a...

CCORDING TO HUMEAN PROMOTIONALISM about practical reasons, the fact that I have a reason to φ holds in virtue of the fact that φ-ing promotes one or more of my desires.1 The topic of this discussion note is the question of how best to understand the promotion relation. Finlay (2006) and Schroeder (2007) have developed two similar probabilistic accounts of promotion. According to their views, pr...

How is moral knowledge possible? This paper defends the anti-Humean thesis that we can acquire by deduction from wholly non-moral premises. According to Hume’s Law, as it has become known, cannot deduce an ‘ought’ ‘is’, since “altogether inconceivable how this new relation be a others, which are entirely different it” (1739: 3.1.1). explores prospects for inferentialist theory of deductive reje...

The measurement problem concerns an apparent conflict between the two fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, namely Schrödinger equation and postulate. These describe inconsistent behavior for systems in so-called “measurement contexts.” Many theorists have thought that can only be resolved by proposing a mechanistic explanation (genuine or apparent) wavefunction collapse avoids explicit ...

Abstract In Fellow Creatures , Christine Korsgaard claims that human beings ought to treat all sentient animals as ends in themselves. However, this article, I argue Korgaard's method goes beyond what a coherent constructivist conception allows, and claim we should therefore adopt Humean rather than Kantian version of constructivism. believe such permits us hold substantial ethical positions ab...

I defend the claim, made in a previous paper, that ‘a Humean can be a contractarian’, against the criticisms of Anthony de Jasay. Jasay makes a categorical distinction between ‘ordered anarchy’ (which he associates with Hume) and ‘social contract theory’. I argue that Hume’s political position was conservative, not anarchist. On Hume’s analysis, a convention is an implicit agreement; the concep...

This paper integrates Pearl’s seminal work on probability and causality with that of Shafer. Using the language of CP-logic, it transposes Pearl’s analysis of interventions and counterfactuals to the semantic context of Shafer’s probability trees. This gives us definitions that work not on the level of random variables, but on the level of Humean events. There are some tangible benefits to our ...