Philosophers Past and Present

Barry Stroud is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy in the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of Hume (1977), The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (OUP, 1984), The Quest for Reality (OUP, 2000), and two collections of essays, Understanding Human Knowledge (OUP, 2000) and Meaning, Understanding, and Practice (OUP, 2000).

[we] still have with us the problem of understanding ourselves and our relation to the world in a distinctively philosophical way. As a guide to that form of understanding, and the difficulties involved in trying to achieve it, Stroud is without peer.

• Acknowledgements ; Introduction ; 1. Our Debt to Descartes (2008) ; 2. Berkeley v. Locke on Primary Qualities (1980) ; 3. Colours and Powers (2003) ; 4. The Study of Human Nature and the Subjectivity of Value (1989) ; 5. Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (2004) ; 6. Ayer's Hume (1992) ; 7. Hume's Scepticism: Natural Instincts and Philosophical Reflection (1991) ; 8. 'Gilding or Staining' the World with 'Sentiments' or 'Phantasms' (1993) ; 9. The Constraints of Hume's Naturalism (2006) ; 10. Practical Reasoning (1996) ; 11. The Charm of Naturalism (1996) ; 12. The Transparency of 'Naturalism' (2008) ; 13. Anti-Individualism and Scepticism (1993) ; 14. Sense-Experience and the Grounding of Thought (2002) ; 15. The 'Unity of Cognition' and the Explanation of Mathematical Knowledge (2001) ; 16. Contemporary Pyrrhonism (2001) ; 17. Perceptual Knowledge and Epistemological Satisfaction (2004) ; Index