Hume on knowledge of the past
Date
2020
DOI
Authors
Cruz Tleugabulova, Maite
Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Much of Hume scholarship in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries has focused on developing naturalistic interpretations by way of combating the traditional skeptical reading of Hume. While on the skeptical reading Hume is engaged in a project of dismantling our fundamental areas of knowledge—like causation, the external world, and the self—on naturalistic readings Hume approaches these subjects as a scientist and ultimately advances positive epistemological aims. However, naturalistic interpreters have neglected to address an important theme of the skeptical reading: that Hume is a skeptic about knowledge of the past. My dissertation addresses this theme by developing naturalistic interpretations of Hume’s accounts of memory, temporal concepts, and belief about the past. I argue that, together, these accounts constitute a positive epistemology. My arguments engage with historical and contemporary literature on time and temporal experience as well as with debates in Hume scholarship.
My first chapter clarifies some important preliminaries, specifically, Hume’s views on how the mind represents objects and on the role of experience in delimiting what the mind can represent. My second chapter defends Hume’s criteria for memory. Hume characterizes memories as ideas that feel a certain way and that correspond to the experiences from which they derived. I argue that these criteria achieve two aims: they classify ideas for the purposes of scientific explanation and they define the term ‘memory.’ My third chapter shows that Hume has a robust and attractively simple theory of temporal experience: experience directly manifests time by being successive. This theory allows Hume to explain how concepts like ‘time,’ ‘simultaneity,’ and ‘tense’ originate in experience. Finally, my fourth chapter applies my findings in the previous chapters to explaining Hume’s views on how the mind forms beliefs about the past. Drawing on the scholarship on Hume’s views on knowledge, I argue that for Hume our typical beliefs about the past constitute knowledge, rather than mere belief. In this way, knowledge of the past is not the gap in Hume’s philosophical system that many have believed it to be, but is rather a credit to his system.