Hume, a Scottish Locke? Comments on Terence Penelhum's Hume

Abstract

Where Terence Penelhum sees a deep continuity between John Locke's theory of ideas and David Hume's theory of perceptions, I argue that the two philosophers disagree over some fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind. While Locke treats ideas as imagistic objects that we recognize as such by a special kind of inner consciousness, Hume thinks that we do not normally recognize the imagistic content of our perceptions, and instead unselfconsciously take ourselves to sense a shared public world. My disagreement with Penelhum over Hume's debt to Locke helps to explain our disagreement over the nature of Hume's scepticism.

Keywords::

• Hume
• Locke
• Penelhum
• idea
• perception
• scepticism

Notes

^1.An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. H. Nidditch (ed.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Further references to this work will be made parenthetically using “E”, followed by the Book, Chapter, and Section numbers.

^2. See also: T 1.1.7.6, 1.1.7.10, 1.2.3.7, 1.3.5.5, 1.3.9.9, 1.3.9.16, 1.3.10.2, 1.3.10.5, 1.3.11.13, 1.3.12.10-11, 1.3.12.22, 1.3.12.24, 1.4.2.33, 1.4.2.38, 1.4.5.15, 1.4.7.3, 2.2.4.4, 2.2.5.5; SBN 20, 22, 35, 85, 110, 116, 119, 121, 129, 134-5, 140, 141, 203, 207, 239, 265, 353, 359. On occasion, Hume borrows mental imagery language from the optical science of his day, as at T 1.3.9.11; SBN 112.

^3. Though this passage seems to be restricted to our thoughts about ideas, he expands his point to include all of our perceptions at T 1.3.8.15-17; SBN 105-106, discussed as follows. David Norton uses “secondary idea” in a non-Humean way in his “Introduction” to the student edition of the Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Given Hume's suggestion that an idea of sensation can give rise to an impressions of reflection, such as desire or aversion (T 1.1.2), and his later re-labelling of impressions of reflection as “secondary impressions” (T 2.1.1), Norton suggests that the ideas that copy the secondary impressions might usefully be called secondary ideas (p. I19). It is important to recognize that Hume's own usage of “secondary idea” is quite different.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 410-2008-2417].

Notes on contributors

Donald C. Ainslie

Donald C. Ainslie is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Principal of University College at the University of Toronto. He has published on Hume's ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and on philosophical issues in bioethics. His new book, Hume's True Scepticism, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.