Terence Penelhum presents a selection of the best of his essays on Hume, most of them quite recent, and three of them not published elsewhere. The central themes of the book are selfhood, the will, and religious belief.
Penelhum argues that Hume's sceptical conclusions on personal identity
are based on conceptual confusions, but that the common charge of circularity made against him is unfounded. He examines the role Hume gives the idea of the self in his analysis of the passions, the dissonance between the account of the self in the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature and that
found in the second, and the reasons for Hume's own dissatisfaction with his views on this theme.
The essays on the will examine Hume's famous attacks on rationalist understandings of human motives, and try to expose the deficiencies in his 'compatibilist' interpretation of freedom.
The
discussion of Hume's views on religion relates them to his scepticism and to his doctrine of natural belief. Penelhum maintains that Hume's ultimate views on religion are to be found in the harshly negative judgements of the first Enquiry, which he did not ever see reason to modify.
Penelhum's
essays will be fascinating for all who work on these themes, whether from an eighteenth-century or a twentieth-century perspective.
1. David Hume: An Appreciation
2. Hume on Personal Identity
3. Hume's Theory of the Self Revisited
4. Self-identity and Self-regard
5. The Self of Book I and the Selves of Book II
6. Hume, Identity and Selfhood
7. Hume's Moral Psychology
8. Hume and the Freedom of the
Will
9. Hume's Scepticism and the Dialogues
10. Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume's Philosophy
11. Religion in the Enquiry and After
12. Butler and Hume
13. Human Nature and Truth: Hume and Pascal
References
Indes
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Terence Penelhum is in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary.
