Research (email szahn@calpoly.edu for draft versions)
1. Is Hume a Perspectivalist? (forthcoming in Ergo)
Hume notoriously pursues a constructive science of human nature in the Treatise while raising serious skeptical doubts about that project and leaving them apparently unanswered. On the perspectivalist reading, Hume endorses multiple incommensurable epistemic perspectives in the Treatise. This reading faces two significant objections: that it renders Hume’s epistemology inconsistent (or at least highly incoherent) and that it is ad hoc. In this paper, I propose a perspectivalist account of epistemic justification in the Treatise that addresses, to a significant degree, these concerns. Hume has available to him an account – what I will call epistemic dispositionalism – that is internally consistent, allows for epistemic continuity between perspectives, and is thoroughly grounded in his naturalism.
2. Kingdom within a Kingdom: A solution to the end of nature problem (forthcoming in Environmental Values)
Developed notably by Callicott (1991), and Vogel (2002; 2015), the end of nature problem can be framed as a dilemma: either all human intentional actions are natural or they are all unnatural and destroy nature as an effect. Given the scope of human influence, the latter entails that there is no nature left on Earth. Therefore, the environmentalist project of protecting nature is either unnecessary or futile. Prevailing attempts to forge a middle path – by, for example, distinguishing natural from unnatural human activities – struggle to find metaphysical grounding. I argue that the biological concept of human proper functioning can ground the relevant distinction between natural and unnatural human activities. Only unnatural activities can destroy nature; specifically, those activities that trace back to beliefs about value that diverge from the human lifeform.
3. The Two Forms of Doxastic Normativity in Hume’s Treatise (Hume Studies, 2021)
Most commentators have argued that there is only one kind of justification (if any) at work in A Treatise of Human Nature – although there are different views about what exactly that is. Some think that all justification is epistemic for Hume. Others think that beliefs can only be justified practically – as being useful or agreeable to the believer or others. I argue that both forms of justification are employed: the epistemic and the practical. This interpretation makes better sense of key passages in the text, as well explaining why Hume sometimes condones the unphilosophical and condemns the extremely skeptical.
4. Evolution and the Welfare of Non-Human Life
Neo-Aristotelians argue that the good of an organism lies in its exercising its characteristic capacities (e.g. growing tall, for a redwood tree). My primary goal in this paper is to defend the claim that neo-Aristotelian functions in non-human organisms are natural against the neo-Darwinian objection that the only natural functions are evolutionary ones. To do this I make use of the analogy of nature as an imperfect creator, whose “flaws” allow for a gap between etiology and function.
5. Hume, Two Texts, and Two Continua
There has recently arisen more serious investigation into the relationship between Hume’s Treatise and his first Enquiry. For example, Hsueh Qu (2020) has argued that Hume’s epistemology changes significantly between the two works, and that this change is an improvement. In this paper, I chart differences between these works upon two distinct but related continua: a metaphysical/semantic continuum and an epistemological one. I argue that both shifts increase incoherence in Hume’s philosophy, and so the Enquiry is overall a more problematic work. What accounts for Hume’s tolerance of this increased incoherence is that the resultant metaphysics and epistemology of the Enquiry are more effective at combating rationalism and superstition than those of the Treatise.
6. Hume and the Self-Undermining Objection
Hume offers a notorious skeptical argument against demonstrative reason that appears to conclude that even simple mathematical inferences cannot be rationally justified. But little attention has been paid to Hume’s fascinating response to the objection that the argument is self-undermining, i.e. that Hume illicitly uses reasoning in order to undermine reasoning. I argue that Hume takes this objection seriously and provides a sincere response, and yet fails to revise his conclusion in light of this response. In order to comport his response with the original argument, Hume is required weaken the conclusion that reason would completely subvert belief to the more moderate conclusion that reason would reach some equilibrium of credence in its output beliefs.