Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses

This chapter addresses Treatise 1.4.2. It explains the argument in detail, showing again that Hume’s account of custom is central to his understanding both of why skepticism with regard to the senses is justified and of how we come to trust our senses nonetheless. This chapter demonstrates just how robust Hume takes the role of custom to be in our psychological lives. Hume does not argue that we are not entitled to a belief in the external world, or that we are not entitled to trust our senses. Instead, he asks about the grounds of that entitlement, and locates it in custom.

Skepticism with Regard to Reason

This chapter focuses on the account in Treatise 1.4.1 of skepticism with regard to reason. It shows that in this section, despite his protestations to the contrary, Hume is a consistent Pyrrhonian skeptic, and that his account is not purely negative. Instead, the chapter shows that he demonstrates that custom is the ground for our legitimate confidence in reason. I argue that he intends not to undermine our confidence in reason, but instead to relocate the source of that confidence. Reason, he argues, is neither self-justifying nor capable of being rationally justified from outside. Nonetheless, we are warranted in trusting reason, a warrant conferred by custom.

Hume’s Moral Psychology

This chapter concludes the discussion of Book II as the theoretical foundation for the Treatise as a whole. It addresses the role of the passions in moral psychology, showing how they ground our accounts of virtue and vice. Virtue and vice are in fact defined in relation to the passions. It also shows how the account of the passions grounds Hume’s moral and political reflections. That is, Hume argues that civil society is initially grounded on certain innate moral psychological dispositions, but also that civil society enables the cultivation of the range of passions that preserve our social unity and that enable us to constitute ourselves as persons in a social context.

The Passions

This chapter begins the exploration of Book II of the Treatise. It explores and explains the distinctions between calm and violent passions and between direct and indirect passions, as they are drawn in Book II, and connects Hume’s accounts to those of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, demonstrating both the senses in which he follows their respective accounts, and those in which he differs. It also discusses the nature of the self as the object of the passions, and explains how Hume takes the passions to be involved in the social construction of the person, showing that Hume does believe that persons are real, and are constructed socially.

The Passions and Human Nature

This chapter addresses the causes of the passions and their role in Hume’s psychology. I argue that the passions form the foundation of Hume’s naturalistic program to explain human nature and normativity. It also addresses the relationship between the passions and the idea of the freedom of the will, showing that the account of the passions undergirds Hume’s critique of the idea of freedom. This chapter also shows how central our social context is to the development of the passions, and to our psychology in general, in virtue of Hume’s argument that not only is our social nature determined by our passions, but that many of our passions are conditioned by social factors.

Causality

This chapter examines Hume’s account of causality. It explores the argument in 1.3.14 in detail and shows how Hume’s skepticism and naturalism are joined by his account of custom in both its habitual and social senses to provide an account of how we engage in causal reasoning despite having no idea of necessary connection or of causation itself. This reconstruction of the argument demonstrates that Hume is neither arguing for nor against the thesis that there are causal connections; instead, he is examining the origin of our conviction that causal explanation is possible. He demonstrates that that conviction is grounded not in any knowledge of causal links in nature, but in our own cognitive architecture.

Epistemological Foundations

This chapter addresses Hume’s commitments both to a naturalistic Pyrrhonism and to an empirical approach to understanding knowledge and morality. It also discusses Hume’s account of ideas and of meaning. In that discussion we will see how his nominalism often leads him to the conclusion that we can be mistaken in thinking that have ideas that we take ourselves to have; we can fail to have any idea that corresponds to a word we correctly use. It also shows how his nominalism grounds a communitarian understanding of meaning and thought. The chapter concludes with attention to Hume’s initial discussions of our knowledge of the external world and our use of causal reasoning.

The Appendix

Readers of the Treatise have long been perplexed by the appendix, in which Hume seems to recant his position on personal identity. Hume himself, while expressing some reservations about the arguments he advances in Book I of the Treatise, never rebuts or withdraws any of these arguments; he only doubts their conclusion. Second, he never replaces the account with any other. These facts at best suggest his ambivalence. Moreover, were he to recant these arguments, given the complete consistency in method in the Treatise as a whole, it is not at all clear that he would be entitled to any of the principal arguments or conclusions of the Treatise, inasmuch as all proceed from the same foundations via analogous reasoning. This chapter shows that this volume’s reading of the Treatise allows Hume a reply to his second thoughts, even if it is a reply he himself did not consider.

Ethics

This chapter shows that in the moral domain, as in epistemology, Hume’s task is to provide a naturalistic explanation of our moral conventions and explain why we so often misunderstand the structure of our own moral thought. He aims to explain how custom grounds, and is not grounded by, the moral universe we inhabit. Although many of the components of Hume’s account of morality derive from Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, the structure into which he places these components—constituted by his naturalism and Pyrrhonism—together with the understanding of custom based in legal theory, gives rise to something entirely new. Hume offers an account of ethics grounded in the union of natural sentiment and a natural propensity to artifice, reflecting the seamless integration of distinct instances of custom as it is manifest both as habit and as convention, as a foundation for the normativity we seek in morality.

Persons as Customary Creatures

This chapter draws together the reading of the Treatise offered in the previous chapters. The author concludes that Hume provides a compelling account of human nature as constituted through the interaction of innate habits and social conventions, and through understanding human nature as essentially social. His account of normativity as constituted by custom has excellent naturalistic credentials, and provides a sound explanation of normativity in a scientific framework. This chapter demonstrates that a communitarian reading of Hume, and a reading of Hume’s analysis of custom grounded in the legal theory of his time offers the most cogent understanding of the Treatise as a whole, and confirms the utility of the interpretative principles proffered in Chapter 1.