Helen Beebee | |
---|---|
Alma mater | University of Warwick University of Liverpool King's College London |
Era | Contemporary |
Institutions | Australian National University University of Manchester University of Birmingham |
Main interests | Metaphysics, causation, free will |
Helen Beebee is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the British Academy. [1] Previously, Beebee was the Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at Manchester. [2]
Beebee's work has been influential across a wide variety of fields, including causation, free will, and natural kinds. [3] Eric Schliesser, writing on NewApps, described Beebee as 'one of the most prominent metaphysicists of our time.' [3] Beebee has a significant interest in the problem of underrepresentation of women in the field of philosophy, and has spoken about the problems that face women philosophers in a modern academic context, such as in her paper "Women and Deviance in Philosophy". [4] [5]
Beebee received her bachelor's from the University of Warwick, her master's from the University of Liverpool, and her doctorate from King's College London. [5]
Beebee is currently the Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, a position she has held since 2012. [5] Before her current position, Beebee held full-time appointments at the University of Manchester, and the University of Birmingham. [5] During her time at Birmingham, she served as Head of Department, and later as Head of School. [5] Besides for her permanent appointments, Beebee has also held temporary appointments at the University of Edinburgh, University of St Andrews, and the University College, London, and has also held a postdoctoral position at Australian National University. [5]
A majority of Beebee's research could be broadly classed as dealing with Humeanism and related issues. [5] She has written on a wide variety of topics related to Humeanism, including attempting to tackle the question of whether or not the laws of nature govern what happens, whether inductive scepticism follows necessarily from a Humeanistic approach, and whether or not it is possible to observe causal relations in a meaningful way. [5] She has also written on Hume himself. [5] Beebee also has a secondary interest in free will, particularly in bringing Humean approaches to the problem of compatibilitism. [5]
Beebee is on the editorial boards of Hume Studies as well as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy . She's also an associate editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . [5] She has co-authored two textbooks, written two books and numerous book chapters, and published a number of peer-reviewed papers in journals of philosophy. [5]
David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist.
The is–ought problem, as articulated by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, arises when one makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between descriptive or positive statements and prescriptive or normative statements, and that it is not obvious how one can coherently transition from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Hume's law or Hume's guillotine is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred based on purely descriptive factual statements.
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Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.