Preface

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE HAVE provided both encouragement and help in the creation of this work. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong read an early version and made a number of suggestions that clarified the project. The two (no longer anonymous) readers, Don Garrett and David Owen, are both distinguished Hume scholars. Together they saved me from a number of embarrassing gaffes and also pointed out important ways in which my reading of Hume and my defense of his views could be made stronger. Harry Frankfurt provided assistance of a different kind: Hesitant as he was about accepting my reading of Hume, and hardly enthusiastic about Hume’s argument itself, his questions forced me to address those who are not already converts to Hume’s position. James Fieser, a prodigious scholar, tracked down the exact sources of some obscure eighteenth-century arguments attacking Hume that I cite. The epigraph is a gift from Roy Sorensen.

I would also like to thank Ian Malcolm and Harry Frankfurt for seeing this project through the Princeton University Press. Florence Fogelin, Jane Taylor, and the Princeton University Press’s Lauren Lepow performed wonders in civilizing the manuscript. I wish to thank the Oxford University Press for allowing me to reprint in its entirety section 10 of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.

This project was supported by the research funds associated with my holding the Sherman Fairchild Professorship in the Humanities at Dartmouth College.