Introduction

Abstract

In the introduction, I describe the three related aims of the book. The first is to defend the Idealist interpretation of the belief in external objects (“bodies”) Hume ascribes to us in the Treatise against the Materialist interpretation often ascribed to him. The second is to discern some of the far-reaching consequences of this interpretive controversy for Hume’s system: metaphysical implications pertaining to the spatiality of objects, causation and the divisibility of space, psychological implications pertaining to our ability to think certain thoughts and to Hume’s ability to account for some of our beliefs, methodological implications pertaining to Hume’s empiricism and epistemic implications relating to our ampliative (non-deductive) inferential practice. The existence of so many interesting implications attests to the significance of the interpretative controversy.