玛丽·谢泼德

作品

• 1824论因果关系

  反对休谟：一个对象不可能无因而开始存在，这是理性的真理，而不是心灵的习惯。

• 1827论对外部宇宙的知觉

  我们如何得以认识一个持续存在的外部世界——并批判贝克莱。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824)
• Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827)