Talk: Early Modern Circle (March 5th @ CalTech)

On March 5th, I will be presenting my paper, "How To Avoid Mis-Reiding Hume's Maxim of Conceivability" at the Early Modern Circle. The meeting will be at CalTech, in Pasadena.

In the paper, I defend David Hume's endorsement of the principle that conceivability implies possibility from two of the four criticisms offered by Thomas Reid. While I have been spending most of my time recently arguing that Reid's complaints about Hume are wrong, I should note that Reid has a tremendous talent for finding challenges that Hume needs to address, even if I am much more optimistic than Reid is about Hume's prospects for addressing those challenges.

It strikes me that Hume and Reid were, to an important extent, on the same page about what sort of project they were up to, and Reid was amazingly sharp, so that all adds up to a recipe for some really interesting and important challenges to look at in connection with Hume's account.