The publication of new intellectual biography of George Cheyne1 provides propitious occasion for a thoroughly skeptical review2 of the question which has long exercised Hume scholars, whether Cheyne was the intended recipient of David fascinating pie-Treatise Letter to Physician,3 the letter which describes his own hypochondriacal physical and mental symptoms and gives an account of his early philosophical development.4 nineteenth-century biographer, John Hill Burton, argued that Hume was probably writing to Cheyne,5 while Ernest Mossner claimed to definitively refute that hypothesis in an article entitled Hume's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, published in 1944.6 Anita Guerrini's intellectual biography does not discuss Cheyne as possible recipient of letter, but she does present well-rounded picture of this interesting eighteenth-century physician from which we can judge his appropriateness as its addressee. In the following discussion I will make use of the biographical material found in this new biography of Cheyne, as well as other sources, to show that Mossner's arguments are less than definitive, and that it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility that the letter was sent to George Cheyne.7 This is possibility that, for reasons that I will make clear, makes good biographical and philosophical sense. At the same time, it is important to keep proper suspense of judgment as Burton did, for the evidence that the letter was either intended for or actually sent to Cheyne is not definitive.

Hume's three principles of association, we are told by way of an introduction, are to account for the way in which simple ideas ... fall regularly into complex ones (T 1.1.4.1; SBN 10).1 It seems as if there is here a single taskone question to be answered. But the ensuing discussion, I shall show, reveals that Hume is, in fact, addressing two distinct questions. And the (single) answer he gives is pretty poor in the case of one, and quite passable in that of the other.

Hume Studies Volume 28, Number 2, November 2002, pp. 319-325 A Guide to Parallel Paragraph and Page References in Oxford University Press Editions of Hume's Treatise and Abstract This guide enables readers to locate in the Oxford Philosophical Texts (OPT) edition of Hume's Treatise those book, part, section, and paragraph numbers (the universal references) that correspond to the page numbers of the edition of this work that has in the past been widely cited in scholarly literature, namely, that first edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge in 1888, and revised by P. H. Nidditch in 1978 (SBN). A similar guide to the Abstract follows. The paragraphs designated in the right-hand columns begin on the SBN page designated in the left-hand columns. If a right-hand column is blank, no paragraph begins on the page designated in the left-hand column. SBN Page xiii xiv XV xvi xvii xviii xix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Universal Reference Intro. 1-2 3 4-5 6-7 8-9 10 1.1.1.1 2-3 4-5 6-8 9-10 11 12 1.1.2.1 1.1.3.1 2-3 4 SBN Page 10 11 12 13 13 14 15 15 16 17 Universal Reference 1.1.4.1 2-3 4-6 7 1.1.5.1 2-6 7-10 1.1.6.1 2 3 1 In accordance with Hume's instructions, the OPT edition integrates into the text of Book 1 material from the Appendix found on SBN pages 627-33 and 636-9. These integrations are marked, as here, by an asterisk. SBN Page 17 18 19 20 »6371 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Universal Reference 1.1.7.1-2 3 4-6 7 note 5 8-9 10-12 13-15 16-17 18 1.2.1.1-2 3-4 5 1.2.2.1-2 3 4-6 7-9 10 320 Guide to Oxford Edition Parallel References SBN Page 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 *637 47 48 49 50 51 *638 52 53 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 *63864 65 Universal Reference 1.2.3.1-3 4-6 7-8 9-10 11 12-15 16-17 1.2.4.1-2 3-4 5-7 8-10 11-14 15-17 18-19 20-21 22 22-24 25-26 27-29 30 31 32 33 1.2.5.1 2-3 4-5 6-9 10-12 13-15 16-18 19-20 21 22-23 24-25 26 note 12 27-28 29 SBN Page 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 78 79 80 81 82 82 83 84 84 85 *62785 86 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 94 95 Universal Reference 1.2.6.1-4 5-8 1.3.1.1 2-4 5-6 7 1.3.2.1-2 3-4 5-7 8-9 10-13 14-16 1.3.3.1 2-3 4-5 6-7 8-9 1.3.4.1 2 3 1.3.5.1-2 3 4-5 5 6-7 1.3.6.1 2-3 4 5-7 8-9 10-11 12-13 14-15 16 1.3.7.1-2 3-4 SBN Page 96 97 *628-9 97 98 99 100 *630 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 *630-2 124 125 126 127 128 Universal Reference 5 6 7 8 1.3.8.1-2 3-4 5 note 21 6 7-8 9-10 11-13 14 15 16-17 1.3.9.1 2-3 4 5-6 7-9 10 11-12 13 14 15-16 17 18-19 1.3.10.1-2 3 4-5 6 7-8 9 10-12 1.3.11.1-3 4-6...

We can make a good prima facie case for the inconsistency of Reid's theory of perception with his rejection of the Ideal Theory. Most scholars believe Reid adopts a theory on which the immediate object of perception is a physical body. Reid is thought to do this in order to avoid problems generated by the veil of perception in the Ideal Theory, a conjunction of commitments Reid closely associates with Hume and Locke. Reid explains that the Ideal Theory leans with its whole weight upon a hypothesis. . .[t]hat nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it (I 96a; B 4).1 Reid attributes to the Ideal Theory thesis (1):

Hume Studies Volume 28, Number 1, April 2002, pp. 3-25 Infinite Divisibility and Actual Parts in Hume's Treatise THOMAS HOLDEN I believe that the smallest portion of matter may be practically divided ad infinitum; that equal qualities taken from equal qualities, an unequal quality will remain; that two and two make seven; that the sun rules the night, the stars the day; and the moon is made of green cheese. Tobias Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769)1 Introduction The ferocious controversy in early modern natural philosophy over the structure of continua focuses on a cluster of supposed paradoxes of infinite divisibility. According to the recent commentary, these paradoxes are straightforwardly mathematical in nature: they simply challenge mathematical constructions of infinite divisibility. So interpreted, the paradoxes are then quite easy to disarm. They rest on quaint mathematical mistakes—forgivable in the early modern period, perhaps, but clear errors all the same. But this interpretation of the Enlightenment controversy will not stand scrutiny. The early modern debate depends crucially on a body of metaphysical doctrine concerning the 'filling' or 'stuffing' of actual physical continua—a body of doctrine that dominates the natural philosophy of the period and that sets the background for the debate over infinite divisibility. The controversy is Thomas Holden is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1170, USA. e-mail: tholden@syr.edu 4 Thomas Holden not then a purely mathematical debate, exclusively concerned with the mathematically tractable properties of continua. And once we appreciate this, we will see that the paradoxes are not so readily dismissed. In this paper I focus on Hume's main argument against infinite divisibility in Book 1, part 2 of the Treatise.2 Using this argument as an example, I want to embarrass the standard mathematical reading and vindicate my alternative metaphysical interpretation. The point can then be generalized to the wider Enlightenment debate. I focus on Hume's argument in particular, since here there is a wealth of commentary and an exceptionally clear case of a major Enlightenment philosopher charged—quite unjustly, I will argue— with the most grotesque mathematical blundering. I. Hume's Lead Argument against Infinite Divisibility and the Standard Objections Although there are several arguments against infinite divisibility in the notoriously thorny Book 1, part 2 of the Treatise, commentators have—naturally enough—focussed on the one argument that heads his discussion and that Hume clearly sees as the centerpiece of his case.3 In sections 1 and 2, Hume frames this lead argument in terms of the divisibility of our ideas and impressions of extended entities. But in section 4, he makes it clear that similar reasoning would apply to extended entities in the extra-mental physical world.4 And—as has been well pointed out in the literature5—the lead argument is indeed general: it purports to show that no finite thing can be infinitely divisible , and that every finite thing must resolve to a finite number of first elements. So we can follow the commentators in bracketing the fact that Hume introduces his argument in terms of mental representations of extended things. It applies no less to extended entities in the physical world. Hume's lead argument is brisk. It runs as follows: (Hl) "[Wjhatever is capable of being divided in infinitum, must consist of an infinite number of parts"; "Every thing capable of being infinitely divided contains an infinite number of parts" (T 1.2.1.2, 1.2.2.2; SBN 26, 29). (H2) "[T]he idea of an infinite number of parts is individually the same idea with that of an infinite extension;... no finite extension is capable of containing an infinite number of parts" (T 1.2.2.2; SBN 30). Therefore: (H3) "[N]o finite extension is infinitely divisible" (Tl.2.2.2; SBN 30). Hume Studies Infinite Divisibility and Actual Parts 5 In short: (i) whatever is infinitely divisible has an infinite number of parts; (ii) whatever has an infinite number of parts is infinitely large; so (iii) nothing finitely extended is infinitely divisible. I will be maintaining that this argument is essentially incomplete or abbreviated. Were it stated in full...

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 2, November 2001, pp. 195-226 Baconian Probability and Hume's Theory of Testimony DOROTHY COLEMAN Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last, The barren Wilderness he past, Did on the very Border stand Of the bestpromis'd Land, And from the Mountain Top of his Exalted Wit, Saw it himself, and shewed us it. — Abraham Cowley (1667) I Hume notoriously argued that no testimony is sufficient to justify belief in the occurrence of a miracle, defined as a violation of a law of nature, "unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous , than the fact, which it endeavors to establish" (EHU 116). His argument for this thesis relies on the premise that in determining the credibility of testimony to any extraordinary event—whether miraculous or merely anomalous —"the evidence, resulting from testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more or less unusual" (EHU 113). Ironically, both advocates and critics of Hume's "diminution principle"1 have invoked a Bayesian model of conditional probabilities in evaluating his theory of testimony. While this fashionable approach is consistent with Hume's focus on epistemic probability, or probability relative to evidence, I Dorothy Coleman is Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University, DeKaIb, IL 60115, USA. e-mail: dcoleman@niu. edu 196 Dorothy Coleman prefer to sidestep this debate because both sides of it assume without argument that all epistemic gradations of probability should be evaluated using a Pascalian model of probability, that is, probability based on the mathematical calculus of chance, of which Bayesianism is one form. I will defend Hume on his own terms by showing that criticisms based on the calculus of chances are irrelevant for assessing his account of testimony because the model of probability on which he bases it is Baconian rather than Pascalian. The foremost advocate of Baconian probability, L. J. Cohen, has credited Hume for being the first to recognize explicitly "that there is an important kind of probability which does not fit into the framework afforded by the calculus of chance," a recognition he finds evident in Hume's distinction between "probabilities arising from analogy and probabilities arising from chance or cause."2 The purpose of this paper is to interpret Hume's account of testimony in light of this insight and to discuss its implications for assessing his argument against the believability of miracles. Critics of Hume's diminution principle, from his contemporaries, George Campbell and Richard Price, to the present,3 argue that even moderately reliable testimony to events having extremely low prior probability is nevertheless credible. Suppose, drawing from one of Price's counterexamples, that a blindfolded individual selects a ball from a container holding 99 white balls and one black ball, that a witness, W, reports that the ball selected was black, and that W's statements about this sort of thing are correct 9 out of 10 times. In this example, the probability that the selected ball is black is 99 to 1, whereas the probability that W's report is true is 9 to 1. Since the former probability is lower than the latter, Hume's diminution principle appears to require that the testimony is not credible, but this is absurd. So Hume's principle, following this reasoning, must be false. Price's criticisms of Hume drew upon the work of Thomas Bayes.4 As a Bayesian, he believed that all degrees of belief or probability are quantifiable and that all rational degrees of belief conform to the Pascalian model of the calculus of chances. Price's criticism evidently made an impression on Hume, who wrote to Price saying that "the light, in which you have put this controversy , is new and plausible and ingenious, and perhaps solid. But I must have some more time to weight it, before I can pronounce this judgment with satisfaction to myself."5 Hume's subsequent revisions to his essay, however, show no departure from his commitment to the principle of diminution or the conclusions he drew from it. This suggests either that he later satisfied himself that Price's criticisms were...

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 1, April 2001, pp. 129-148 Hume on Steadfast Objects and Time DONALD L. M. BAXTER One of the most difficult parts of Hume's account of time to grasp, much less accept, is that a single, temporally simple thing can coexist with a succession of things. This perplexing result follows directly from his discussion of steadfast objects. I show that Hume is committed to this claim, and respond to commentators who suggest otherwise. I then note why the claim seems inconsistent and argue to the contrary that it relies on a consistent, though unusual, theory of time in which a single moment can coexist with successive moments. After formalizing the theory to help show that it makes sense, I defend it against a textual objection, and derive from it some surprisingly commonsensical results . Nonetheless it is not a common-sense theory, and I will end by giving a Humean explanation why his theory of time seems so unnatural. Being "stedfast and unchangeable" is in contrast to being "a succession of changeable objects" (T 37).: A steadfast object, for Hume, is something that is "fast in place, firm; fixed," as Johnson puts it in his dictionary.2 It does not change; that is, there is no "succession of one thing in the place of another," in Johnson's definition of the relevant sense of "change." The steadfast object is not quickly replaced, nor is it itself a succession. If it were a succession it would have duration, which according to Hume steadfast objects lack (T 37). Yet while it remains unreplaced, other changes occur elsewhere. Not everything is steadfast while it is. Not being a succession and so lacking duration, it nonetheless coexists with successions having duration.3 Note that having temporal parts entails being a number of things in succession , for Hume. So, not being a succession entails not having temporal parts. When reasoning about space, he makes the analogous premise for this Donald L. M. Baxter is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-2054, USA. e-mail: donald.baxter@uconn.edu 130 Donald L. M. Baxter argument explicit. He claims that anything with spatial parts is a number of coexistent things as opposed to a single thing (as opposed to "an unite," T 30). He then says, "All this reasoning takes place with regard to time" (T 31). The difference is that temporal parts are successive, not coexistent (T 36). So anything with temporal parts is a number of successive things as opposed to a single thing. It's a succession. So a single thing remaining unreplaced lacks temporal parts, because it is not a succession. Thus Hume thinks that a single thing lacking temporal parts can coexist with a succession of things. Not only does such a single thing lack actual temporal parts, it lacks potential temporal parts. Anything divisible has parts according to Hume (see T 29). So something lacking parts is indivisible. Hume's view is even stranger given his view that moments of time are abstractions from single things in time. Each moment is an abstraction from the temporally simple object occupying it. So the structure of temporal relations between single things in time is exactly the structure of temporal relations between moments. Given this and the foregoing, some single, indivisible moments coexist with some successions of single moments. I won't argue that this conception of time is Hume's by discussing abstraction, however . That is too much to do. Rather I will assume this result of Hume's theory of abstraction and merely reinforce it by the following argument: Hume thinks that time consists of indivisible moments (T 31). Anything in time exists at at least one moment. Something has duration if and only if it exists at distinct successive moments. So something in time that lacks duration exists at a single indivisible moment. Yet there is something that lacks duration, namely a steadfast object, which coexists with something that has it, namely, some succession. If things coexist, then the moments they exist at coexist. So a single indivisible moment coexists with distinct successive moments. I There is clear textual evidence that a...

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 1, April 2001, pp. 181-185 Book Reviews ANNEJAAP JACOBSON, ed. Feminist Interpretations of David Hume. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 323. ISBN 0-27101971 -9, cloth, $55.00. ISBN 0-2170-1972-7, paper, $19.95. This collection of thirteen essays and editor's introduction is part of a "Re-reading the Canon" series that includes already published volumes of feminist interpretation of philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to de Beauvoir and Derrida. The essays in this volume on David Hume cover the breadth of his work and aim to engage it with the concerns and challenges characteristic of feminist scholarship. No doubt many of us would welcome an essay collection of uniformly high quality to provide feminist perspectives on Hume and the philosophical questions he addresses; such would be useful, for example, to supplement standard reading in courses on Hume or early modern philosophy. Although I hesitate to recommend the volume as a whole in such a capacity, a number of the essays warrant the attention of scholars and students of Hume's writing. All but one of the essays in the volume are published here for the first time. The usual constraints preclude discussing each in turn or doing justice to the breadth of offerings. Instead, I briefly discuss here some of the more noteworthy contributions. Christine Swanton's "Compassion as a Virtue in Hume" aims to defend the status of Humean compassion as a virtue against two Nietzschean doubts. The first stems from Nietzsche's claim that pity involves "infection" with the Volume 27, Number 1, April 2001 182 Book Reviews pain of another and, so, arouses aversion to its object. Viewed thus, one may doubt that Humean compassion—involving as it does sympathy with another's suffering—is possible, let alone a virtue. Second, because pity involves a comparison of another's plight with our own, Nietzsche suggests it is vulnerable to ignoble motives: perhaps pity allows us to take pleasure in our comparative superiority or prompts us to aid its object only out of cowardice , lest our own vulnerability be revealed. Swanton draws on Hume's account of "the double sympathy" (Treatise of Human Nature II ix) in order to defend him against the first problem. This is no easy task, given Hume's somewhat hydraulic picture of the passions, but Swanton carries it off well. Noting the role of benevolence in Humean pity, Swanton explains how sympathy with another's great pain at the same time arouses a benevolence that involves one empathetically in another's interest in a way that produces not aversion but a concern for the alleviation of their suffering. Thus is pity possible on Hume's picture. The stronger case that pity is a virtue, Swanton argues, must take into account pity's scope and depth. The limited scope of the passion goes some way toward extricating it from Nietzsche's charge that "Pity increases the amount of suffering in the world." The limited depth of the passion—it is only faintly felt where the original impression of pain is slight—addresses the worry that pity is destructive of personal projects and values. However, Swanton raises the interesting question of whether the pain that nonetheless accompanies pity or compassion precludes pity from being a virtue, given that Hume says we disapprove of traits of character that are "immediately disagreeable" to their possessor. Here I find Swanton's answer on behalf of Hume—that what is "usual" or "common" in human beings constrains the criteria for virtue— less compelling. The defender of Humean virtue does better, I think, to focus on Hume's elaboration of the point of view from which assessments of traits of character are authoritative in order to examine the sense in which Humean appeals to what is common in human nature function for Hume in a normative, rather than statistical, sense. Swanton does attend to this corrected point of view in defending Hume against the second Nietzschean objection. There she argues that Hume's account of the corrected point of view of sympathy warrants the judgment that compassion undermined by ignoble motives is a vice...

Introduction a la publication du texte de L. F. Ancillon, «Dialogue entre Berkeley et Hume», qui decrit un entretien imaginaire entre les deux philosophes. Presente a l'Academie prussienne des Sciences et des Belles Lettres en 1796, publie en 1799, le texte temoigne de la reception de la pensee de Hume et Berkeley dans les milieux philosophiques francophones a Berlin.

L'A. apporte une correction au texte du chapitre V de la «Recherche sur les principes de la morale» de Hume, consacre a l'utilite. Critiquant la theorie egoiste, Hume fait appel a l'evidence de l'experience et de la nature plutot qu'a l'autorite d'Aristote en matiere de morale.