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English Pages [141] Year 1976
HUME'S MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY Jonathan Harrison
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1976
Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W .1 GLASGOW
NEW YORK
TORONTO
MELBOURNE
WELLINGTON
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CASEBOUND ISBN O 19 PAPERBACK ISBN O 19
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824566 I 875037 4
Oxford University Press 1976
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PREFACE MosTofwhat Hume wrote about Moral Philosophy is to be found in Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature (published in 1740, a year later than the rest of the Treatise) and in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (published in 1751). In the following pages, I shall be concerned with only a small part of what he says in these two works. I shall be concerned only with those pages in which he tries to answer the question 'How do we know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice?' These pages are to be found almost, though not quite, entirely in Book III, Part I, Sections 1 and 2 of the Treatise, and Section I and Appendix I of the Enquiry. There are, of course, a great number of other questions (sometimes more exciting ones) which Hume discusses in these two books, and on these I hope