Professor Dan O'Brien

This book is the first devoted to Hume’s conception of testimony. Hume is usually taken to be a reductionist with respect to testimony, with trust in others dependent on the evidence possessed by individuals concerning the reliability of texts or speakers. This account is taken from Hume’s essay on miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. O’Brien, though, looks wider than the miracles essay, turning to what Hume says about testimony in the Treatise, the moral Enquiry, the History of England and his Essays. There are social aspects of testimonial exchanges that cannot be explained purely in terms of the assessment of the reliability of testifiers. Hume’s conception of testimony is integrated with his account of how history informs our knowledge of human nature, the relation between sympathy and belief and between pride and the conception we have of our selves, the role played by social factors in the judgment of intellectual virtue, and the importance Hume places on epistemic responsibility and the moral and personal dimensions of testimonial trust. It is not possible to focus on testimony without allowing other aspects of our nature into the frame and therefore turning also to consider sympathy, wisdom, history, morality, virtue, aesthetic judgment, the self, and character. O’Brien argues that Hume’s reliance on the social goes deep and that he should therefore be seen as an anti-reductionist with respect to testimony. Hume on Testimony will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Hume and on early modern and contemporary approaches to the epistemology of testimony.

This book brings together a team of international scholars to attempt to understand David Hume’s conception of the self. The standard interpretation is that he holds a no-self view: we are just bundles of conscious experiences, thoughts and emotions. There is nothing deeper to us, no core, no essence, no soul. In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, though, Hume admits to being dissatisfied with such an account and Part One of this book explores why this might be so. Part Two turns to Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, where Hume moves away from the ‘fiction’ of a simple self, to the complex idea we have of our flesh and blood selves, those with emotional lives, practical goals, and social relations with others. In Part Three connections are traced between Hume and Madhyamaka Buddhism, Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, and contemporary cognitive science.

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin; it criss-crosses intellectually and conceptually from a discussion of morality to that of the sacralisation of politics.

Dan O’Brien focuses on the role that sympathy plays in Hume’s account of how we come to share the emotions and thoughts of others, and how it is involved in our coming to have a sense of ourselves as persons. We are praised by others for our virtues, achievements and standing in society (and criticized for our vices and shortcomings), and this leads to our feeling proud (or ashamed). Such passions are self-directed and Hume’s account of the generation of such passions is in turn an account of how we come to conceive of and experience ourselves. We feel the approval of others via sympathy, and the proud self that I am now—will, in turn, go on to sympathize with future approval (or disapproval) of my life and actions. My existence is constituted by a spiral of self-creation into the future, constantly fed by the reactions of others. -- Provided by publisher.

This chapter focuses on human nature and morality, realms that resisted the early modern move away from teleology towards naturalistic explanation. It discusses three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch David Hume’s criticisms of the approaches. The chapter describes Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. It explores the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning. There are distinct domains or ways of thinking of reality within which teleology can be seen as relevant, that is, with respect to the causal interaction between ordinary objects in the world, with respect to individuals and with respect to society and political progress. J. Harris is right that Hume often meets religion with humour rather than anger or frustration, but the humour is often cutting, mocking and acerbic, particularly so in the History of England.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1920), Picasso’s dealer and early authority on cubism, interpreted Picasso, Braque and Gris as Kantian in their approach. In §1 I provide an introduction to cubism and to Kahnweiler’s use of Kantian terminology to distinguish analytic and synthetic cubism. §2 concerns the ‘idealist’ interpretation of cubism in which the works are seen as attempting to depict Kantian things-in-themselves. I argue that this interpretation betrays a misunderstanding of Kant and it is at odds with Picasso’s pluralism. In §3 I suggest an alternative Kantian interpretation of cubism, one that draws on Kant’s empirical realism and the cognitive input that is necessary for experience. In §4 this is contrasted with the two-aspect reading of transcendental idealism. Lastly, in §5, I acknowledge that the major cubists had limited or no knowledge of Kant, but nevertheless argue that it is illuminating to see their works in terms of Kantian realism.