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Another Idea of Necessary Connection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Extract

One of the greatest of Hume's philosophical achievements, which becomes in its turn an assumption presupposed by some of the others, is perhaps best stated at the end of the First Enquiry: ‘If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another’ (XII (iii) 164).

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 57 , Issue 222 , October 1982, pp. 487 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1982

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References

1 For more on this distinction between two senses of ‘experience’ see, for instance, my Introduction to Western Philosophy (London, and Indianapolis: Thames and Hudson, and Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).

2 ‘Can an Effect Precede its Cause?’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Suppl. Vol. 28 (1954), 49–50.

3 In S. Hook (ed.), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science New York: NYUP, 1958), 15–30; also reprinted in M. Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962).

4 I see no reason to withdraw anything said about action at a distance in Hume's Philosophy of Belief (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and Humanities Press, 1961), 124–126. On the other hand Chapter VII does require substantial amendment, attempted in Hume Studies IV (1978).

5 ‘On the Interpretation of Hume’, in The is Ought Question, W. D. Hudson (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1969), 67–69.

6 See, for instance, ‘Must Morality Pay? or, What Socrates Should Have Said to Thrasymachus’, in Skepticism and Moral Principles, C. L. Carter (ed.) (Evanston, Illinois: New University Press, 1973), 109–133.

7 P. Sloan (ed.), John Cornford: A Memoir (London: Cape, 1938), 179.

8 I develop this and other related themes in Hume's Philosophy of Belief, Chapter VI.

9 Tom Lehrer provides a sung commentary on the choice of the word ‘devices’ in this context!

10 See, for instance, Principles, sections 105–108; or the Letter to Johnson dated 25/XI/29, section 2.