Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article presents a limited defense of Humeanism about practical reason. Jonathan Dancy and other traditional objective-reasons theorists (e.g., Schueler, Bittner) argue that all practical reasons, what we think about when we deliberate, are facts or states of affairs in the world. On the Humean view, the reasons that motivate us are belief-desire combinations, which are in the mind. Thus, Dancy and others reject Humeanism on the grounds that it cannot allow that anyone acts from a normative reason. I argue, first, that this critique fails. What we deliberate about prior to action in cases of conflict sometimes are our desires: we consider our wants from a “normative” perspective (akin to Hume’s general or common point of view). So normative reasons are also desirebased , but involve appeal to desires of a higher order. These second-order desires can motivate. Second, I argue that objective-reasons theorists have a reverse problem with explanation of behavior. If reasons are considerations in the world, a person has reasons to do any number of actions at any given time. I charge that theories that exclude desire-based reasons cannot explain why an agent does one particular action rather than another. Recent philosophers (Alvarez, Hironymi, Lord, and Mantel) strike a compromise position, allowing for normative reasons in terms of facts and motivating reasons in other terms. However, I suggest that they may be subject to the same difficulty because of the relation between normative and motivating reasons that each has.

Comprised of twenty-nine specially commissioned essays, A Companion to Hume examines the depth of the philosophies and influence of one of history's most remarkable thinkers. Demonstrates the range of Hume's work and illuminates the ongoing debates that it has generated Organized by subject, with introductions to each section to orient the reader Explores topics such as knowledge, passion, morality, religion, economics, and politics Examines the paradoxes of Hume's thought and his legacy, covering the methods, themes, and consequences of his contributions to philosophy

Commentators have sometimes underappreciated or misunderstood the point of Hume’s theory of the passions. This paper offers an overview of the literature on Hume’s psychology of the passions, with the aim of showing that it is not simply another mechanistic analysis alongside the offerings of Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Recent discussions reveal that Hume’s theory makes an influential contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on the importance of certain passions in human well-being, offers a conception of a social rather than a solitary self, and, among other things, has important implications for moral and motivational theory. This essay begins with the background to and the details of Hume’s theory, with reference to contemporary interpretive treatments of Hume’s taxonomy of the passions. It then considers specific questions to which Hume’s theory of the passions has given rise, and appraises the various perspectives offered in response. Last, it considers broad interpretations concerning the import of Hume’s theory of the passions on the whole: that the passions are crucial to morality; that the passions offer a solution to the problem of the self; that the passions are key to sociability and self-regulation; and that the passions play a fundamental role in religion and in the appreciation of tragedy. Throughout, this essay also notes topics on which more scholarly discussion would be especially beneficial.

A survey of theories on the passions and action in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe reveals that few, if any, of the major writers held the view that reason in any of its functions executes action without a passion. Even rationalists, like Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and English clergyman Samuel Clarke, recognized the necessity of passion to action. On the other hand, many of these intellectuals also agreed with French philosophers Jean-François Senault, René Descartes, and Nicolas Malebranche that, for passions to be useful or to become virtues, they must be governed by reason. Without the moderation of reason, passions will be unruly, distort our notions of good, and disrupt our rational volitions. In response to these popular early modern perspectives, Enlightenment thinker David Hume offered a now-famous argument that reason without passion cannot motivate, drawing the further conclusion that reason cannot govern the passions, either. Given that no one in Hume's era seemed to defend the claim that reason alone can motivate action, what was Hume's intention?

Hume argues against the seventeenth-century rationalists that reason is impotent to motivate action and to originate morality. Hume's arguments have standardly been considered the foundation for the Humean theory of motivation in contemporary philosophy. The Humean theory alleges that beliefs require independent desires to motivate action. Recently, however, new commentaries allege that Hume's argument concerning the inertness of reason has no bearing on whether beliefs can motivate. These commentaries maintain that for Hume, beliefs about future pleasurable and painful objects on their own can produce the desires that move us to action. First, I show that this reading puts Hume at odds with Humeans, since the latter are committed, not only to the view that beliefs and desires are both necessary to action, but also to the view that beliefs do not produce desires. Second, I review textual, philosophical and historical grounds for my interpretation of Hume's argument for the inertness of reason. I argue that the new line on Hume, while consistent with a certain reading of the Treatise, is not supported by the Dissertation on the Passions and the second Enquiry, where Hume argues that all motivation has an origin in \"taste\", which I take to be different from belief. Thus, Hume's arguments do support the contemporary Humean theory of motivation.

Humeans about practical reasoning have tried to explain how some of our desires are reasongiving and some are not. On one account, we act from reasons only when we act on desires that cohere in a consistent set. On another account, we act on reasons only when we act on desires that do not undermine our values. Both accounts are problematic. First, the notion of a consistent set of desires is vague and introduces a cntenon not necessanly rooted in the agent's own motivations. Second, valuing is a matter of degree: we cannot divide desires into those that reflect values and those that don't. I maintain instead that (1) all desires are reason-giving, but we have best reason to do what we most care about, and (2) the rationality of desires derives from the normative perspective we take on our desires in attempting to determine their relative importance to us.

Most naturalists think that the belief/desire model from Hume is the best framework for making sense of motivation. As Smith has argued, given that the cognitive state (belief) and the conative state (desire) are separate on this model, if a moral judgment is cognitive, it could not also be motivating by itself. So, it looks as though Hume and Humeans cannot hold that moral judgments are states of belief (moral cognitivism) and internally motivating (moral internalism). My chief claim is that the details of Hume's naturalistic philosophy of mind actually allow for a conjunction of these allegedly incompatible views. This thesis is significant, since readers typically have thought that Hume's view that motivation is not produced by representations, coupled with his view that moral judgments motivate on their own, imply that moral judgments could never take the form of beliefs about, or representations of, the moral (virtue and vice).