ماري شيبرد

الأعمال

• 1824بحث في علاقة العلة والمعلول (An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect)

  ضد هيوم: أن الشيء لا يمكن أن يبدأ بالوجود بلا علة حقيقة عقلية لا عادة ذهنية.

• 1827مقالات في إدراك عالم خارجي (Essays on the Perception of an External Universe)

  كيف نصل إلى معرفة عالم خارجي مستمر – مع نقد لبيركلي.

الموقف

Shepherd’s first book attacks Hume’s account of causation. Hume held that we cannot know a priori that every event has a cause and that our belief in causal connection is only habit. Shepherd replies that reason itself shows the contrary: if something began to exist without a cause it would have to produce itself, which is contradictory; so the principle that nothing can bring itself into existence is a necessary truth. Her second book asks, against Berkeley, how we know an external world: unperceived objects are inferred because sensations need causes that are not themselves sensations. Hers is a realist, rationalist reply to the Scottish empiricists.

الحياة والسياق

Mary Shepherd (1777–1847), born Lady Mary Primrose at Barnbougle Castle near Edinburgh, was educated at home. She married the barrister Henry John Shepherd in 1808 and lived in London, where she took part in intellectual society and published two books of philosophy in 1824 and 1827, as well as articles. Her work was discussed by Whewell and others in her lifetime, then forgotten until its recent rediscovery.