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.