Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus
Central Michigan University
Department of Philosophy & Religion

Campus Address: Anspach 301N
Email: John.P.Wright@cmich.edu
Telephone: (989) 774-2652

Degree:

B.A., University of Toronto (1964), M.A., University of Toronto (1967), Ph.D., York University (1975)

Teaching:

PHL 230 Philosophy of Religion, PHL 302 History of Philosophy: Modern Period, PHL 490 Senior Seminar

Research Interests:

Early Modern Philosophy, especially Hume, Locke, Descartes, Malebranche, Reid, and Hutcheson; Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment; History of the Mind Body Problem

Select Publications:

Books:

Hume’s 'ATreatise of Human Nature': An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind Body Problem, co-edited with Paul Potter (Oxford, 2000; 2002)

Hume and Hume's Connexions, co-edited with M.A. Stewart (Edinburgh University Press and Pennsylvania State Press, 1994)

The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Minnesota, 1983)

Recent Articles:

"Hume on the Origin of 'modern Honour': a study in Hume's philosophical development", in Religion and Philosophy in Enlightenment Britain, edited by Ruth Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 

"Scepticism, Causal Science, and 'The Old Hume' ", Journal of Scottish Philosophy 10.2 (2012), pp. 123-42.

"The Understanding", in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Centuty, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 148-70.

"Hume's Sceptical Realism", in The Oxford Handbook of David Hume, ed. Paul Russell (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 60-81.

"Review Article: Hume: An Intellectual Biography, by James A. Harris", British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 823-32. 2017. 

"Custom and Habit in Physiology and the Science of Human Nature in the Enlightenment", Early Science and Medicine, 22, 2017, pp. 183-207.

Forthcoming: 

"Skepticism and Incomprehensibility in Bayle and Hume", in Age of Skepticism: Pervasive Doubt and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Reason, Religion, and Political Thought, eds. Jeffrey Burson & Anton Matytsin, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.

With Catherine Tabb, "Habit and the Association of Ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment", in Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II: Method, Mind and Matter, eds. Aaron Garett & James Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book Reviews:

Review of Jacqueline Taylor's Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume's Philosophy, in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 2016.  

Review of Tamás Demeter, David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism: Methodology, and Ideology in Enlightenment Inquiry, forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 2018.