"David Hume - An Account of Necessity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hume David)

EARLY COMMENTARIES HUME'S WRITINGS



"Hume's Account of Necessity"

from



1740

5/1/95

Copyright 1995, James Fieser ([email protected]). See end note for
details on copyright and editing conventions. This is a working
draft; please report errors.[1]

Editor's note: The anonymous author of this essay identifies himself
as the author of and Free-Agency of the Soul>, (London, 1740). The aim of the essay
is to prevent Hume's account of determinism from having "any
mischievous effect upon the opinions or morals of mankind." After a
summary of Hume's views on determinism, begins his refutation. The
issues of free will and necessary connection, he believes, are

related, and that the notion of "necessary connection" is explained
by Newton as cohesion, attraction, repulsion and communication of
motion. The proof that we are free is that we recognize causal
necessity in external objects only because such necessity stands in
sharp contrast to human freedom. The mischievous threat of Hume's
theory is its implication that our conduct is beyond our control. He
agrees that there is a causal-like relation between our motives and
the morally significant actions which they elicit, but our feeling
of freedom shows that this connection is not absolute. Changing
subjects, he argues contrary to Hume that space is indeed infinitely
divisible in a speculative sense; for, given any spatial object
considered as a whole, it must necessarily be seen to have parts.
For a discussion of this essay, see E.C. Mossner, "The First Answer
to Hume's : An Unnoticed Item of 1740," in History of Ideas>, 1951, Vol. 12, pp. 291-294.


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COMMONSENSE: OR, THE ENGLISHMAN'S JOURNAL

Saturday, July 5, 1740, pp. 1-2


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