ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, I maintained that, according to Hume’s empiricist method, the reasons for which we act are to be inferred from our behaviour. But in order to understand the sense in which they can be said to cause our actions, we need to explore whether or not Hume was a Humean about causation, viz. a regularity theorist. I shall be answering the question negatively, offering a reading that swims in the narrow pool between the Scylla of the logical positivist interpretation and the Charybdis of the metaphysical realist view of the ‘New Hume’.