Hume on Miracles

Hume, Miracles, and Probabilities: Meeting Earman’s Challenge

The centrepiece of Earman‟s provocatively titled book Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (OUP, 2000) is a probabilistic interpretation of Hume‟s famous „maxim‟ concerning the credibility of miracle reports, followed by an aggressive critique of the maxim when thus interpreted. He argues that the first part of this maxim, once its obscurity is removed, is simply trivial, while ...

Hume on Testimony Revisited

Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a ‘global reductionist’, where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume’s reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, th...

Hume on well-being

Hume on Personal Identity

First, Hume notes that we have a strong inclination to call something the “same” even when it is radically different. For instance, remove a chunk of matter from some object and we call it the same. A mature oak tree is said to be the “same” as the sapling. A fat adult is said to be the “same” as the tiny infant. So strong is this inclination that philosophers have attempted to explain identity...

Hume, the New Hume, and Causal Connections

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