Geoffrey Gorham, Macalester College
"Descartes on the Endurance of the Soul"

      Descartes declares in the Synopsis' to the Meditations that the soul is "immortal by its very nature", though he concedes that this conclusion depends on assumptions not made explicit in the Meditations themselves (AT 7 13-4). In spite of his confidence about the soul's immortality, there appears to be a rather straightforward proof, premised entirely on central doctrines of Cartesian metaphysics, that the soul exists only fleetingly:
      (1) A soul is a substance (EG: AT 7 28)
      (2) There is no real distinction between a substance and its duration. (EG: AT 8A 30)
      (3) The countless parts of the duration of the soul are completely independent of one another. (EG: AT 7 49)
      (4) If two things are completely independent then they are really distinct substances. (EG: AT 7 162)
      (5) Hence, a soul persists only as long as any given part of duration.
      In the first section of the paper, I briefly explain Descartes's commitment to (1) - (4), and argue that the problem of the non-endurance of the soul cannot be quickly fixed, for example, by relativizing the criterion of substance individuation to a given time. Next, I critically evaluate the recent suggestion of Flage and Bonnen (2000) that the problem does not arise at all for Descartes because he thinks that time is a mere mode of thought. Against this, I argue that time (or, more precisely, duration) is a fundamental element of Descartes's world. For his laws of nature involve essentially the temporal notion of speed. And the doctrine of continuous creation, from which these laws are ostensibly derived, is grounded on assumptions about the temporality of God's action. Descartes also insists that finite minds have successive duration. (AT V 195) Given the objective reality of Cartesian time, there seems to be no way of avoiding the implication that a Cartesian soul persists in time only as a collection of substantial temporal parts, just as a body exists in space only as a collection of substantial spatial parts. In the terminology of recent discussions of persistence, the soul perdures but does not endure.
      In the final section of the paper, I attempt to reconcile this model of the Cartesian soul with Descartes's own frequent insistence that the soul is "something quite single and complete" (AT 7 89) and (unlike the body) "immortal by its very nature" (AT 7 14). A Cartesian soul, I argue, is not simply an instance of thinking substance, in the way a Cartesian body is simply an instance of extended substance. Unlike bodies, souls are substances endowed with, or informed by, individual essences or natures which fix their identity over time and despite change in their principal attribute. As Descartes says: "Even if all the accidents of the mind change. . . it does not on that account become a different mind; whereas a human body loses its identity merely as a result change in the shape of some of its parts." (AT 7 14) And although the duration of the Cartesian soul consists only of countless temporal parts, each of which are genuine substances in their own right, the natures or essences of individual souls are not likewise divisible into temporal parts. Thus: "Thought will indeed be extended and divisible with respect to its duration [durationem], since its duration can be divided into parts. But it is not extended and divisible with respect to its nature [naturam] since its nature remains un-extended." (AT 5 149) So there remains an important sense for Descartes in which finite souls are simple, unextended in either time or space, and hence "immortal by their very nature."

Michael LeBuffe, Texas A&M University
"Spinoza's Rationalist Ethics"

      I argue that Spinoza appropriates a central Cartesian view about sense perception and that this view has important consequences for his ethics when considered together with three other Spinozistic theses: 1. Human passion is a variety of inadequate idea (IIIp1-p3); 2. The mind's knowledge of itself is limited to its perception of the ideas of the affections of body (IIp23); 3. The human mind perceives external bodies only to the extent that the human body is affected by them (IIp26). The essay has five sections, which I summarize here.
      1. In the third of his Meditations and, most clearly, in his replies to Gassendi, Descartes develops a rationalist account the way in which an idea can come to correspond with its object. Gassendi (AT VII, 284) defends an empiricist account of this development: my sensory, imagistic idea of an object, even if it is misleading, may be the only one I have. If this is the case, then, when I come to understand the object better, I am reasoning about and changing this idea. Descartes holds, against this view, that an idea of sense experience does not change. One can indeed come to have an idea of an external object that reliably corresponds to it, but this will be a different, new idea, one derived at least in part from reason, that one then holds in addition to the flawed experiential idea. According to Descartes, only such ideas, ideas derived at least in part from reason, can be known to resemble their objects.
      2. Although the vocabulary of Spinoza's philosophy of mind is quite drastically different from that of Descartes', Spinoza seems to adopt some version of Descartes' view. This point may be seen most clearly at IIp35s, where Spinoza, in presenting a traditional puzzle about the appearance of the sun, arrives at the same conclusion that Descartes reaches in Meditation III (AT VII, 39): the idea we have of the sun from sense experience is not changed by further reflection and experience. Rather, reflection and experience generate a second idea of the sun, and the first one remains, inadequate though it may be.
      3. One important result of Spinoza's appropriation of Descartes' view is his conviction (at V Preface, for example) that passion can never be completely overcome. Passions are, for Spinoza, a kind of inadequate idea produced in people by external objects. In other words they are perceptions of the same kind as imagistic ideas. Descartes' view implies, then, that just as misleading imagistic ideas remain after I gain adequate knowledge of an object, so misguided passionate responses to objects will remain even in agents who come to know better. Spinoza himself makes this point by returning to the sun example at the beginning of his discussion of human bondage (IVp1s).
      4. Another important result is Spinoza's particular version of the ancient thesis that self-knowledge is a virtue of central importance. Spinoza may seem blandly to echo the Charmides at IVp56: "He who is ignorant of himself is ignorant of the foundation of virtue and, consequently, of all virtues. . . . Such a person does not act from virtue at all." His conception of the value of self-knowledge, though, is peculiar to his ethics and moral epistemology. First, Spinoza limits the mind's knowledge of itself to its perception of ideas of affections of the body (IIp23). So the self has for Spinoza (as it does not for Descartes) the same shaky epistemological status as other objects of experience. Spinoza's demand for self-knowledge is in part, then, a response to the finding that our perceptions of ourselves, which are gained by adventitious experience, may be misleading in the same way that other sense perceptions are. If this is right, our unreflective views about the human good and the appropriate objects of desire are likely to be mistaken and require correction or interpretation in just the same way that our unreflective views about other objects of experience do. Second, Spinoza claims that any perception of external objects that we have will be gained by means of the ideas of the affections of our bodies (IIp26d). So we must know about ourselves in order to interpret that experience. This is, as it undoubtedly is for Descartes, an epistemological necessity: we must understand optics and the human eye in order to interpret our experience of the sun. But it is also, for Spinoza, a moral necessity since desire and other passions are as much part of our experience of objects as color and shape.

Madeleine Arseneault, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Good and Evil in Spinoza's Ethics"

      In On the Improvement of the Human Understanding, Spinoza wanted to inquire whether "there exists and can be appropriated some true good by which alone, to the exclusion of everything else, the self would be affected and which, moreover, after I had found and understood it, I could enjoy forever in continuous and supreme happiness" [sec. 1]. Right away he is struck that good and evil are not properties of things considered in themselves; instead, we call things good or evil depending on their relation to us. The question motivating my paper is whether Spinoza allows for any objectivity in our judgments of good and evil.
      Jonathan Bennett and Edwin Curley both think that the early part of Spinoza's Ethics presents what they call a subjective' ethics, according to which things are arbitrarily judged good or evil according to the fleeting (dis)pleasures of the common person (who is ignorant of their causally determined nature). However, both Bennett and Curley think there is a switch to an objective' ethics in the latter part of the Ethics, according to which things are judged good or evil not as a matter of arbitrary pleasure, but that it is a factual matter whether x is good for y.
      I argue that it is misleading to say there's a switch from a subjective account to an objective account of good and evil. In the senses of subjective and objective defined here, the early and later accounts of good and evil are both subjective and objective. If the early account of good and evil is subjective because the good is relative-to-us, then the latter account of good and evil is still subjective in this sense. After presenting the case for a subjectivist reading of key passages in Parts 1 and 3, I defend the argument that we can secure the objectivity of our ethical judgments by making good and evil what's instrumentally valuable to a particular desire and longing. I adopt the model of human perfection mentioned in the Preface to Part 4 as the particular universal longing--this undermines the variability of satisfying arbitrary and momentary desires and thus provids an objective standard for judgments of good and evil, which the knowledgeable person recognizes.
      This possibility is supported by Spinoza's definitions of emotions, perfection, and power of acting. In 3P11S, joy and sadness are defined as passions by which the mind passes to and from a greater perfection. In the Preface to Part 4 (II/208), passing to or from a greater perfection is described as increasing or decreasing our power of acting. And so joy and sadness are increases and decreases in our power of acting. In 4P8, knowledge of good and evil just is consciousness of joy and sadness, and good is defined as what's useful to preserve our being and power of acting.
      I conclude by giving a consistent account of the early and later definitions of good and evil. Concerning the Appendix of Part 1, I argue that it is strictly true that good and evil are determined by how things affect and please the ignorant, despite their ignorant ends. Also in 3P39S, the objectivist reading holds for the description of every joy whatever as good, and goodness is judged by our own affect. Finally, I suggest that since desire and appetite are defined as the essence of man (Part 3, Definitions of the Affects I), and since man's essence is to persevere in being, we can make sense of 3P9S where good is defined as satisfying a longing of any kind.

Laurence Carlin, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
"Leibniz on Final Causation"

      In one form or another, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and others, sought to banish teleology from the seventeenth century intellectual scene. No one resisted this trend more persistently than did Leibniz, for despite the criticism of final causes by his contemporaries, Leibniz insisted that good sense could be made of final causation. Indeed, Leibniz embraced final causes from every ontological perspective of his system: not only do God and creatures act under the influence of ends, but the world is created such that there is an entire system of final causes in place, one which harmonizes with a system of efficient causes (cf. Monadology sec. 79). While it is well known that Leibniz embraced this system of teleology, no account has been given of exactly how Leibniz understands the metaphysics of final causality in his mature people. This paper aims to give an account of precisely that. As we shall see, Leibniz forged a system of final causation about which even some of the most Aristotelian of medieval philosophers would express doubt.
      In the first section of this paper, I show that contrary to popular belief, worries about final causation started long before the seventeenth century. These worries are evident from three theses about final causality that can be found in the writings of several Scholastic writers--Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Suarez, et alia. In the second section, I turn to Leibniz's treatment of these three teleological theses. There I argue that Leibniz's rejection of two of these seems to yield the surprising and counterintuitive result that for Leibniz the influence of final causation is indistinct from that of efficient causation--that is, that final causation reduces to efficient causation. As we shall see, the issue turns on whether or not Leibniz believes in the causal efficacy of representational features of perceptual states (in this case, states of desire). In the third and final section, I suggest that Leibniz's system of final causes is really intended by him as an explanatory scheme with no ontological import of its own.

Michael Losonsky, Colorado State University
"Of Angels and Humand Beings: Locke, Leibniz, and Condillac on Language"

      Renaissance philosophy of language can be characterized roughly as severing the Scholastic bond between the study of logic and the study of language and instead pursuing the pragmatic and rhetorical features of natural languages. Locke continues along this path by disparaging the relevance of logic to the understanding of the structure of mind and language. However, Locke's primary achievement was to unite the study of language with the study of the human understanding, particularly its cognitive capacities.
      The Lockean perspective inspired new approaches in the philosophy of language, particularly those of Leibniz (1646-1716) and Condillac (1715-1780). Both philosophers recognized the significance of Locke's turn to language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and aimed to improve upon the Essay by weaving its philosophy of language together with distinct threads from earlier periods. The different threads Leibniz and Condillac choose result in distinct weaves that characterize competing approaches in the philosophy of language in the modern period.
      Leibniz reintroduces the logical perspective on human language that flourished during Scholasticism but lost prestige and luster during the Renaissance. A major reason for this loss was that there was a fairly wide gap between the evident grammatical structure of natural language and the language of logic. Renaissance humanists exploited this gap in their parodies and critiques of traditional scholastic logic. Leibniz was able to fill this gap by rejecting the assumption that natural language's logical form is located in the apparent grammatical structure of language. Instead, grammatical structure is seen to be a function of the needs, desires and other contingencies that shape how human beings actually think and speak. However, underlying this contingent human order, there is a "natural order of ideas" that is "common to angels and men and to intelligences in general" (Leibniz 1962, VI.6: 276).
      While Leibniz develops what might be called the "system perspective" on natural language, Condillac develops a pragmatic or "use perspective" on language. Leibniz laments that Locke shares the widely held opinion that the "forms of the logicians are of little use" (Leibniz 1962, VI.6: 9) and he, being "of quite another opinion," zeroes in on the logical form of language. Condillac shows no interest for, in today's terminology, the semantics of natural language. He adopts Locke's disdain for traditional logic, maintaining that "all that logicians had to say [about reasoning] in a good many volumes, seems to me to be entirely superfluous and of no use" (Condillac 1947, I: 27). When Condillac turns to logic in his Logic, or The First Developments of the Art of Thinking, posthumously published in 1792, it is, as Condillac himself writes, a "logic like no other" (Condillac 1947, II: 371). Instead, it is a genetic account of how human beings come to intentionally use the physical signs of language to think, analyze and acquire knowledge.
      So while both build on Locke's union of linguistic and psychological studies, Leibniz reintroduces logical structure into linguistic studies by giving the human understanding itself a logical form, while Condillac preserves the Renaissance concern for pragmatic and historical contexts by placing the mind itself into a historical, specifically anthropological context.

Lex Newman, University of Utah
"Locke's Ideas and the Intelligibility of the Distinction of Primary and Secondary Qualities"

      Given a longstanding interpretation, students of Locke could expect to learn that he misunderstands the implications of his own theory of ideas; that only in later, idealist empiricists is there an appreciation of the theory's consequences for hypotheses about the nature of the external world. On this interpretation, Locke purports to derive mechanist doctrines, including the distinction of primary and secondary qualities (hereafter 'PQ' and 'SQ'), via an inside-to-out strategy to discover the nature of the external world: the inquiry begins with the immediate objects of awareness--"ideas"; attention to differences in our ideas is then supposed to reveal the PQ-SQ distinction. This interpretation standardly adds that Berkeley, a later, cleverer empiricist, shows that Locke's own arguments for the distinction--when properly understood--support that all qualities are mind-dependent. This story, while unflattering for Locke, is supposed to illustrate the inevitable anti-realist pressures on empiricism that result from the orthodox interpretation of ideas as the immediate objects of perception. The lesson we're supposed to learn from Berkeley is that a consistent empiricist cannot also be a mechanist--while not accepting the orthodox account of ideas.
      The last 50 years of Locke scholarship has seen a trend towards canonizing a somewhat different lesson from Berkeley's attacks on Locke. The unflattering implications of the longstanding interpretation have prompted charity-minded interpreters to question whether Locke holds the orthodox view of ideas. A. D. Woozley writes (referring to the orthodox account of Lockean ideas): "Now, if that was Locke's view of ideas, the objections to it are so elementary and so obvious that it hardly needed a Berkeley to point them out. . . . It would be hard to understand why anybody should want to rate Locke as an important philosopher if his whole theory rests on errors so elementary that a first-year student in philosophy has no difficulty in spotting them" (1964, 26). Woozley adds, "when interpretation leads to travesty, it is time to question the interpretation" (1964, 28). Since (goes the argument) it's the orthodox account of ideas that creates the mess, the way out of the mess is a rejection of that understanding. As Maurice Mandelbaum writes, "we should interpret his [Locke's] theory of knowledge in the light of his relations to Boyle, rather than merely treating him as a forerunner of Berkeley. . . . I hope that by looking at him in this way we shall no longer have to attribute to him that degree of obtuseness which epistemologists who favor a Berkeleian view of the relations between philosophy and science have been pleased to attributed to him" (1964, 3-4). Revisionist interpreters thus suggest that we understand Locke as holding a direct theory of perception (cf. John Yolton 1970, 128 and 131; passim)--an account whereby, in veridical sensation, the mind has direct perception of external things themselves, not merely of ideas.
      Though the foregoing interpretations are quite different, the lessons they draw are underwritten by the same assumption--if Locke holds the orthodox account of ideas, Berkeley embarrasses him. From this common assumption, the longstanding story has it that Berkeley embarrasses Locke; the revisionist interpretation denies that Locke holds the orthodox account. Neither interpretation has resulted in interpretive fecundity vis-à-vis the PQ-SQ distinction. All interpreters struggle with Locke's treatment of the distinction, finding what he writes puzzling and difficult to render coherent.
      I shall question the common assumption, arguing that Locke's account is intelligible (never mind true) even attributing to him the orthodox understanding of ideas. I focus on three influential problems of intelligibility in his account--each is raised by Berkeley and echoed in recent secondary literature.
      1. One alleged problem of intelligibility I call the Mechanism Inconceivability Problem. Accordingly, there's no intelligible way even to conceive of mechanical bodies--no way on an orthodox understanding of ideas. For mechanistic doctrine entails that bodies have properties resembling PQ ideas, but no properties resembling SQ ideas. On the orthodox understanding of ideas, however, PQ ideas are constituted by imagery of SQ ideas: e.g., the visual idea of shape consists of color imagery. Berkeley thus writes: "it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moved, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind"--ideas of shape without colors "are inconceivable" (Prin. 1:10). In solving the Mechanism Inconceivability Problem, I emphasize Locke's definition characterizing qualities in terms of powers to produce ideas: "Whatsoever the Mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding, that I call Idea; and the Power to produce any Idea in our mind, I call Quality of the Subject wherein that power is" (II.viii.8; italics mine).
      I take Locke to be clarifying that his PQ-SQ distinction--a distinction of qualities--is not an ontological hypothesis, but an explanatory hypothesis: a hypothesis specifying not the properties that bodies have, but those that explain the production of ideas. Taking seriously his definition of 'quality', nothing Locke writes commits him to the view Berkeley characterizes as "inconceivable": Locke remains agnostic as to whether bodies have properties resembling, say, the color red, committing only to the hypothesis that none of their qualities bear this resemblance--i.e., committing only that properties resembling red (if there be any) are causally irrelevant to the production of the ideas of red.
      2. A second alleged problem of intelligibility I call the Conceptual Priority Problem. Even granting my solution to the Mechanism Inconceivability Problem, this second problem has it that there's no way to arrive at the mechanist's list of causally relevant properties by deriving them from Lockean ideas (on the orthodox understanding)--no way to begin with sensory idea concepts, and then derive mechanical concepts: reflection on the content of sensations does not yield a phenomenal criterion by which to sort our ideas into those that are of PQs, versus those that are of SQs. As Berkeley reads him, Locke's appeals to perceptual variation--e.g., what feels warm to one hand, but cold to another (II.viii.21)--are supposed to get at the phenomenal criterion: ideas subject to perceptual variation represent SQs; those immune represent PQs. But as Berkeley argues, all of our ideas are subject to perceptual variation: Locke's arguments intended "to prove that colours and tastes exist only in the mind" turn out "to prove the same thing of extension, figure, and motion" (Prin. 1:15). In solving the Conceptual Priority Problem, I hold (with others) that Locke's appeals to perceptual variation are for the purpose of illustrating mechanical concepts, not deriving them--contra Berkeley. I argue that Locke thinks mechanical concepts are derived from ordinary experience, not philosophical reflection: common experience suggests that size and shape are causally relevant to impact collisions, but not color and smell: altering the size of a key destroys its mechanical fit with a lock, but altering its color or smell does not.
      3. A third alleged problem of intelligibility I call the Resemblance Incoherence Problem. Even granting my solutions to the above problems, this problem has it that there's no intelligible understanding of Locke's resemblance doctrine--the doctrine whereby PQ-ideas resemble PQs. Berkeley writes that "an idea can be like nothing but an idea . . . it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas" (Prin. 1:8)--concluding that the mechanist conception of body "involves a contradiction in it" (Prin. 1:9). In solving the Resemblance Incoherence Problem, I emphasize the representational character of ideas according to the orthodox understanding. As such, the mind conceives of the mechanical properties of bodies via its ideas of those properties: "a Man" has "no notion of any Thing without him, but by the Idea he has of it in his Mind" (II.xxxii.25). Thus, the doctrine that ideas of size, shape, and motion resemble the same list of qualities, does not violate Berkeley's thesis that "it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas." For Locke should be understood as claiming that we conceive a likeness between two sets of ideas: on the one hand, our ideas of size, shape, and motion; on the other hand, our ideas of the qualities of bodies understood in terms of mechanist doctrine.

Eric Schliesser, Washington University
"Berkeley's Response to Newton: Philosophy between Common Life and Natural Philosophy"

      In the third of Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Hylas offers an indispensability argument for why the existence of "matter" should be accepted; he deems it essential for the practice of Newtonian science. This is not an isolated occurrence in Berkeley's philosophy: at the tenth objection Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley considers a more generalized version of the indispensability argument as an objection to the "notions" that Berkeley advances; they must be false because they are "inconsistent with several sounds truths" of natural philosophy and mathematics. In response to this objection, Berkeley offers an "instrumentalist" reinterpretation of the achievements of natural philosophy and mathematics. That is, he denies the separate claim to authority of these sciences over philosophy, or at least independent from it. But he can only do so by limiting the aim of these sciences to predictions alone. They lose all explanatory value, for instance.
      As others have noted, Berkeley is not the first to consider an indispensability argument. My concern in this paper is thus not to establish Berkeley's originality, but rather to call attention to the fact that he is among the first (if not the first) to recognize that Newton's achievements could serve as a separate and authoritative source of justification within philosophic debates. More intriguingly, Berkeley also seems to have realized that these achievements threatened the conceptual unity between philosophy and natural philosophy presupposed by his Early Modern predecessors (recall Descartes' tree).
      Now one might think that Newton's achievements are the result of some special, privileged method. But Berkeley cannot (and does not) accept this since this would offer a potential source of justification of the distinct authority of the sciences. Moreover, Berkeley is acutely aware that, in his time, a further gulf has opened up between modern' philosophy and what he calls "common life." To put it dramatically, Berkeley first articulates what has since become known as the problem of reconciling the tensions between the scientific' and manifest' images. This gulf between modern philosophy and common life leads, he believes, to skepticism not only about the existence of God but also about the use and relevance of people. It is the latter issue that explains the ultimate significance of the Berkeley's treatment of the indispensability argument.
      This paper first analyzes Berkeley's formulation of the indispensability argument. It then explains how Berkeley's instrumentalist response follows from his belief that Newton violated cannons of intelligibility. Finally, it shows how the Three Dialogues explicitly offers a kind of "philosophical therapy" to the new, complicated predicament of philosophy in the age after Newton. Berkeley's account is directed at other philosophers to explain how philosophical systems should be treated with regard to common life and natural people. In the process, we'll see that Three Dialogues are more than a mere clarification of Principles of Human Knowledge: they are indispensable for understanding Berkeley's aims.

Girard Brenneman, Johns Hopkins University
"Broadening the Scope of Humean Natural Believing"

      Norman Kemp Smith and various subsequent commentators have claimed that Hume regards belief in causal connections and belief in the existence of body as "natural beliefs": beliefs based on a natural propensity or instinct that are without logical foundation and yet immune to skeptical attack. According to these commentators, while Hume thinks skeptical doubts may be possible for a short time, in the end, nature is always to strong for principle, and our natural beliefs persist.
      While I agree with these commentators that Hume thinks such a class of natural beliefs exists, I think it is misleading to define natural beliefs as irresistible, since the majority of our beliefs about causal relations and about the existence of body are not all that irresistible: we regard some as tentative and some are erroneous. What really are irresistible in Hume's philosophy are the basic modes of belief formation, which we cannot doubt systematically, though we can doubt many particular beliefs formed through them. We should, then, avoid speaking of natural beliefs as irresistible and should state our interpretation of Hume's doctrine in terms of these unavoidable modes of belief formation, rooted in human nature. Of course, this is not to deny that there are a few beliefs that partake of this psychological irresistibility (viz., that there is a strict causal order in nature, and that at least some bodies exist). But most of the beliefs to which the irresistible modes of belief formation give rise lack this necessity.
      Many commentators, moreover, while holding that Hume regards belief in causal connections and belief in the existence of body as "natural beliefs," nevertheless deny that he grants this special status to belief in an intelligent designer of the universe, and, by implication, deny that Hume thinks this religious belief need be accepted. On this view, Philo's seeming acceptance of the design argument at the start of part XII of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is dismissed as irony. This exclusion by some commentators of belief in an intelligent designer of the universe from the class of the "natural" results, I think, from their mistakenly assuming that, in addition to being fundamental to human nature and immune to skeptical doubts, what they call "natural belief" must possess another characteristic: it must be essential for survival. Richard Dees voices this view when he writes, "the claim that a belief in God is a natural belief is simply not plausible . . . Hume was well aware that people could live perfectly well without a belief in God in a way that they simply could not live without a belief in causation" ["Morality above Metaphysics," Hume Studies 28 (2002): 131-147, at 141].
      I would prefer to see this claim expressed not in terms of "natural beliefs" but in terms of natural modes of belief formation. Put this way, the position would be that because one can survive without forming beliefs that nature is intelligently designed, it follows that the mode of belief formation which yields such beliefs cannot be "natural," regardless of its other similarities to modes of belief formation that do count as "natural." These commentators hold that our ways of coming to believe in causal connections and in the existence of body, on the other hand, are to count as "natural" modes of belief formation, since they are essential for survival.
      While it is correct to claim that Hume thinks natural ways of believing must, among other things, serve a practical function, I hold that it is mistaken to interpret him as limiting this function to what I will call a "strong" sense of survival value, according to which only ways of believing requisite for survival count as natural. In this paper I argue against exclusive reliance on this strong notion of survival value as a criterion of natural believing, and in favor of allowing as an alternative what I will call a "weak" notion of survival value. The view to be defended is that Hume should be interpreted as holding that, while some natural ways of believing are necessary for survival, others are, as he puts it, merely "useful in the conduct of life." Recognition of this latter, weaker sense in which a way of believing can be useful broadens the conception of what is natural. It allows us to regard Hume as allowing that our way of forming beliefs about an intelligent designer of the universe is natural, since Hume thinks that such beliefs are useful, although not essential for survival. This broader conception of what is natural in believing also permits us to regard moral and aesthetic ways of forming evaluations to count as natural, because, according to Hume, the practice of forming these evaluations is useful, although not absolutely necessary, for life.
      In what follows, then, I will offer textual support for my claim that Hume thinks a type of believing can be natural belief even if it promotes survival only in a weak sense. Next, with the weak sense of survival value in mind, I will examine the utility of belief in an intelligent designer of the universe, and argue that Hume can regard this type of believing as having a rightful claim to the title of being natural. Finally, I will argue that Hume regards moral and aesthetic evaluations as results of natural ways of believing, and defend this claim against the charge that these evaluations are not beliefs of any kind, but are instead expressions of sentiment. The reward for these interpretative efforts will be that Hume can be seen as recognizing a more consistent, comprehensive set of natural ways of believing, all of which share striking similarities with one another.

Kaveh Kamooneh, University of Minnesota
"Normativity and Generality: A Study in the Unity of Hume's Treatise"

      Normativity is a difficult problem for Hume. In line with his aspirations to be the Newton of the moral sciences, Hume presents a descriptive account of human nature that is thoroughly naturalistic. On this account beliefs and moral judgments are causally determined sentimental responses of the imagination. This picture seems radically at odds with the common sense view that normativity requires agency and the possibility of deliberative choice between true and false claims rather than sentiments which seem to lack truth value.
      This paper argues that Hume makes room for the common sense view of normativity by appealing to general rules. Since custom facilitates the imagination's associations, the imagination often takes frequently conjoined factors to be constantly or causally conjoined. By taking a more general view and comparing a wider set of experiences, the understanding can distinguish frequent from constant conjunctions and correct the imagination's initial association. The understanding's correction of the imagination's hasty and myopic associations, however, is not limited to causal beliefs. Moral judgments are similarly imaginative associations subject to correction by the understanding's more general view.
      Sympathy, by which our ideas of others are promoted to passions, is the basis of moral evaluation for Hume. But its responses by themselves are not moral judgments for at least the following two reasons: 1. sympathetic responses are variable according to the subjective circumstances while moral judgments are not, and 2. morality sometimes requires judgments for which we have no sympathetically induced passion. Getting around these problems once again requires the understanding's more general point of view. The first problem is resolved when the understanding discounts the variable subjective circumstances, which are accidental to moral evaluation, and focuses on the object of valuation by assessing the effects of the object's characteristics on pain and pleasure in general. The resulting judgments are judgments about the natural virtues. The second problem is resolved when the understanding widens the imagination's focus on present interests and brings into consideration the long term interest in social peace and harmony. The understanding, by preferring that long term interest, endorses the artificial virtues and turns the natural passion to follow social norms of justice and promise keeping, formed by custom or convention, into normative motivation. So the mechanism by which we arrive at normative evaluation, whether in causal or moral contexts, involves the understanding deliberatively abstracting from the immediate or customary associations of the imagination.
      While this provides an account of the mechanism by which reasoned judgments are produced, it does not answer the question of why we should be reasonable in the first place? Why take the understanding's reason seriously and think of its interferences with our natural processes as corrections? The second section of the paper focuses on this question. The answer must respect the bounds of Hume's naturalism. Given that framework, the paper argues that allowing the influence of the understanding serves our passionate natures by furthering our interests. The ultimate source of normativity then, is the utility of reason. Hume makes his consequentialist criterion for virtue explicit. The paper argues that he had the same consequentialist criterion for causal reasoning. So Hume's account of reason is unified not only on the question of the mechanism of reason, but also on the question of its ultimate authority.
      The paper ends with a section attempting to reconcile the offered interpretation with well known Humean passages stating the ineffectiveness of reason in generating and justifying both causal and moral beliefs.

Yumiko Inukai, University of Pennsylvania
"Hume's Bundling Problem: Our Experience of the Unity of the Self"

      I have previously argued that Hume's problem concerning his account of personal identity that he confessed in the Appendix to the Treatise is his presupposition that perceptions initially occur together in one experience, whether in succession or at the same time. This presupposition generates inconsistency with Hume's fundamental principles that perceptions are all distinct and separable existences and have no necessary connections. Those principles imply that perceptions exist without bearing any relations to anything else, and the only relations Hume can allow as holding between them are natural relations that ensue in experience as perceptions occur or philosophical relations that are formed through the voluntary comparing of two perceptions. However, the co-occurrence of perceptions in one experience that must be presupposed in the formation of either type of relations implies that they are experienced as already unified in a bundle prior to the relating activity of the imagination. Thus, Hume would have to concede as an inexplicable brute fact that certain, particular perceptions are experienced as occurring together. I have argued that Hume is prevented from accepting this fact by those principles which entail the radical independence of perceptions; for in acknowledging that fact, Hume would have to allow that perceptions do bear some kind of relation to other perceptions in such a way that they are available together to a single awareness to be experienced in succession or at the same time. The problem that Hume's commitment to the radical independence of perceptions prevents him from presupposing the initial connection among perceptions in a bundle, I will call the Bundling problem.
      In this paper, I will consider four possible solutions to the Bundling problem, including Hume's own candidates which he himself offers in the Appendix. The first solution suggests that (i) the mind perceives some real connection among distinct perceptions. I will divide into two solutions the other suggested solution by Hume, that perceptions inhere in something simple and individual. In both versions, a subject of inhesion is understood as a bearer of particular perceptions, but we can distinguish two different roles that such a subject may have. In the one (ii), the subject is endowed with cognitive powers such as thinking, judging, attending, relating, directed toward perceptions; that is, there is an active "unifier" of perceptions. In the other (iii), the subject is a mere passive recipient of perceptions; that is, a "spectator" to which perceptions appear and in which they are unified. A fourth solution (iv) suggests that a particular point of view from which perceptions are seen and unified is occupied by a currently occurring perception itself, not a distinctly existing subject: a current perception serves as, as it were, an owner of other perceptions, in which they are experienced as connected in a bundle. In this solution, an individual perception is given the capacity to grasp, and thereby to forge a connection with, other perceptions.
      I will argue that only the fourth solution accords with Hume's strictly empiricist methodology that the only available explanatory resources are what we discover in experience, namely, impressions and ideas, their perceptible qualities, and patterns of their occurrence. Having considered that solution, I will attempt to show that his theoretical commitment to the atomistic nature of perception and the so-called Separability principle--the very commitment that proves to be problematic for his account of personal identity--creates tension in his professed project of "mental geography" that is supposed to be conducted only on the basis of careful observation of immediate experience. I will argue that the absolute distinctness of perceptions is not grounded on a careful observation of our conscious experience at all, but derived through the conceptual analysis of ideas guided by the Separability Principle; Hume takes what can be done to ideas by cognitive operation of the imagination to reveal what is the case at the experiential level. In concluding the radical independence of perceptions, he virtually abandons his empiricist methodology: his move from the separability of ideas to a fact about our phenomenal experience is utterly incongruous with his empiricist outlook, which, I believe, underlies his difficulty in providing an adequate empiricist account of personal identity.