Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume's Treatise from the Inside Out

Description

This volume provides a reading of Hume’s Treatise as a whole, foregrounding Hume’s understanding of custom and its role in the Treatise. It shows that Hume grounds his understanding of custom in its usage in English legal theory, and that he takes custom to be the foundation for normativity in all of its guises, whether moral, epistemic, or social. The book argues that Hume’s project in the Treatise is to provide a socially inflected cognitive science—to understand how persons are constituted through an interaction of individual psychology and their social matrix—and that custom provides the ligature that ties together Hume’s naturalism and skepticism. In doing so, it shows that Hume is a consistent Pyrrhonian skeptic, but that he takes the positive part of the skeptical program seriously, showing not only that our practices have no foundation, but that they need none, and that custom alone serves to explain and to justify our practices. Cover The Concealed Influence of Custom Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Part I 1. Introduction: Principles of Interpretation 2. Why the Treatise? Why Book II? Why Custom? Part II 3. The Passions: Some Basic Distinctions 4. The Passions and Human Nature 5. Hume’s Moral Psychology Part III 6. Epistemological Foundations 7. Causality 8. Skepticism with Regard to Reason 9. Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses 10. Personal Identity and Philosophical Method 11. Ethics Part IV 12. The Appendix: Second Thoughts about Second Thoughts 13. Persons as Customary Creatures References Index