ABSTRACT
According to Hume, our beliefs in the unobserved are not restricted to beliefs about what experiences we will have in the future. We also believe in the existence of bodies; and that is not just a belief about the course of our experience. Philosophers have been especially interested in the epistemic credentials of what they call our belief in the ‘external world’, but Hume does not concern himself with the truth or reasonableness of that belief at all. He does not begin by asking whether there are bodies or not, or whether we know or reasonably believe that there are. As a scientist of man, he asks why we have the belief, or how we come to have it. ‘What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?’ (p. 187). Man, not bodies, is his primary concern.
