Mary Shepherd

Dzieła

• 1824An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (Esej o relacji przyczyny i skutku)

  Przeciw Hume’owi: to, że przedmiot nie może zacząć istnieć bez przyczyny, jest prawdą rozumu, a nie nawykiem umysłu.

• 1827Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (Eseje o postrzeganiu świata zewnętrznego)

  Jak dochodzimy do wiedzy o trwającym świecie zewnętrznym – z krytyką Berkeleya.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.