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E-book
Author Sandis, Constantine

Title Character and Causation : Hume's Philosophy of Action
Published Milton : Routledge, 2018

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Description 1 online resource (163 pages)
Contents Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; List of tables; Preface and Acknowledgements; Hume Texts; Prologue: People and Their Actions; 1. The Soft Science; 1.1 Action and Its Causes; 1.2 Motive and Necessity; 1.3 Reason Enslaved; 1.4 Ruling Passions and the Will; 2. Causation: The Very Idea; 2.1 The New in the Old; 2.2 Necessity and Projection; 2.3 Our Concept of Causation; 2.4 Missing Shades and Impressions; 2.5 Meaning and Intelligibility; 3. Necessity, Power, and Freedom; 3.1 One Final Method; 3.2 Secret Powers; 3.3 Singular Causation and Induction
3.4 Freedom and Necessity4. People Across Time; 4.1 The Self as Bundle; 4.2 Fictions; 4.3 Paradox and Appendix; 4.4 Between Vulgarity and Metaphysics; 5. The Self as Agent; 5.1 Characteristic Selves; 5.2 Mistaken Identity; 5.3 Characteristically Responsible; 5.4 The Will; 6. Hume's Actual Theory of Motivation; 6.1 Humeanism About Motivation; 6.2 Reason and Influence; 6.3 Reasons and Error; 6.4 Hume's Anti-Humeanisms; 7. Past Actions; 7.1 Sentiment and Detachment; 7.2 Understanding Sympathy; 7.3 The History of Thought; 7.4 A Just Medium; Epilogue: Hume and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Summary In the first ever book-length treatment of David Hume's philosophy of action, Constantine Sandis brings together seemingly disparate aspects of Hume's work to present an understanding of human action that is much richer than previously assumed. Sandis showcases Hume's interconnected views on action and its causes by situating them within a wider vision of our human understanding of personal identity, causation, freedom, historical explanation, and morality. In so doing, he also relates key aspects of the emerging picture to contemporary concerns within the philosophy of action and moral psychology, including debates between Humeans and anti-Humeans about both 'motivating' and 'normative' reasons. Character and Causation takes the form of a series of essays which collectively argue that Hume's overall project proceeds by way of a soft conceptual revisionism that emerges from his Copy Principle. This involves re-calibrating our philosophical ideas of all that agency involves to fit a scheme that more readily matches the range of impressions that human beings actually have. On such a reading, once we rid ourselves of a certain kind of metaphysical ambition we are left with a perfectly adequate account of how it is that people can act in character, freely, and for good reasons. The resulting picture is one that both unifies Hume's practical and theoretical philosophy and radically transforms contemporary philosophy of action for the better
Bibliography BibliographyIndex
Notes Print version record
Subject Act (Philosophy)
Agent (Philosophy)
PHILOSOPHY -- History & Surveys -- Modern.
action.
Constantine Sandis.
Copy Principle.
causal necessity.
causation.
David Hume.
detachment.
ethics.
explanation.
free will.
History of England.
historical understanding.
moral psychology.
motivation.
normativity.
passions.
personal identity.
philosophy of action.
rationality.
reason.
revisionism.
sympathy.
Treatise of Human Nature.
understanding.
Act (Philosophy)
Agent (Philosophy)
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781351980838
1351980831
9781351980821
1351980823
9781351980814
1351980815
9781315270029
1315270021