Terence Penelhum presents a selection of the best of his essays on Hume, most of them quite recent, and three of them not published elsewhere. The central themes of the book are selfhood, the will, and religious belief. Penelhum argues that Hume's sceptical conclusions on personal identity are based on conceptual confusions, but that the common charge of circularity made against him is unfounded. He examines the role Hume gives the idea of the self in his analysis of the passions, the dissonance between the account of the self in the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature and that found in the second, and the reasons for Hume's own dissatisfaction with his views on this theme. The essays on the will examine Hume's famous attacks on rationalist understandings of human motives, and try to expose the deficiencies in his 'compatibilist' interpretation of freedom. The discussion of Hume's views on religion relates them to his scepticism and to his doctrine of natural belief. Penelhum maintains that Hume's ultimate views on religion are to be found in the harshly negative judgements of the first Enquiry, which he did not ever see reason to modify. Penelhum's essays will be fascinating for all who work on these themes, whether from an eighteenth-century or a twentieth-century perspective.

Henry Allison examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology, as contained in the Treatise of Human Nature. Allison takes a distinctive two-level approach. On the one hand, he considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the "space of reasons." On the other hand, Allison provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to a version of the perceptual model, according to which the paradigm of knowledge is a seeing with the "mind's eye" of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data, Whereas regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgment.

Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics was really motivated by Hume. In Knowledge, Reason, and Taste, renowned Kant scholar Paul Guyer challenges both of these views. He argues that Kant's entire philosophy--including his moral philosophy, aesthetics, and teleology, as well as his metaphysics--can fruitfully be read as an engagement with Hume. In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts. In doing so, Guyer examines the progress both Kant and Hume made on enduring questions about causes, objects, selves, taste, moral principles and motivations, and purpose and design in nature. Finally, Guyer looks at questions Kant and Hume left open to their successors.

Offers a reconstruction of Hume's social theory and examines his moral philosophy, account of social power, and system of ethics.

Defines the cutting-edge of scholarship on ancient Greek history employing methods from social science.