Editors' Introduction for Volume 42

Editors' Introduction for Volume 42 Ann Levey, Karl Schafer, and Amy M. Schmitter The new editorial team, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer and Amy Schmitter, are very pleased to present this special double-issue of Hume Studies. It contains a wide variety of articles on subjects old and new, as well as an assortment of book reviews, commissioned by the new book review editor, David Landy of San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the many people who have helped us get this volume and our tenure as editors underway, including the preceding editors-in-chief, Angela Coventry and Peter Kail, and preceding book review editor, Annemarie Butler, as well as the previous editors-in-chief Corliss Swain and Saul Traiger, who offered invaluable advice about procedures, practices, and technological issues. For further technological advice and support, we are very thankful to Rick McCarty and his successor, Amyas Merivale, who have helped keep an outdated and sometimes cranky editorial site running. Rico Vitz too deserves many thanks, particularly for taking over financial matters when we were defeated by local regulations. We have been delighted to begin working with our copy editor, Corina David, and the good people at the Philosophy Documentation Center, particularly Diana Malsky, who translate the journal into physical and electronic print. Last and perhaps most importantly, we owe very great thanks to the many people who have worked on the content of the journal: both the many patient souls who submitted their work for consideration to the journal and the even greater number of people who generously answered our calls to referee papers (and often went through multiple rounds of review). There would be no journal without their largely thankless and anonymous labor. The volume now before you offers articles on a mix of topics in Hume scholarship: some engage with long-standing issues of perennial interest, others break new ground both in topic and approach, many trace Hume's intellectual influences, and all offer material for and spurs to future research. Emilio Mazzi and Gianluco Mori's "'Loose Bits of Paper' and 'Uncorrect Thoughts': Hume's Early Memoranda [End Page 3] in Context" exhaustively tracks the sources and historical context of Hume's early memoranda. Mazzi and Mori show that these notes pre-date the Treatise. But their analysis of transcription errors and other elements of the memoranda leads them to conclude that what we have are notes of notes, many of which are significantly later than the dated material. The wide range of subjects covered by the memoranda means that their account touches on topics ranging from metaphysics to history (with interesting comparisons to other articles in this volume, such as that by Kevin Busch). Their spadework also illuminates the deep influence of the Abbé du Bos and Pierre Bayle on surprisingly diverse areas of Hume's thought. Mazzi and Mori argue that most previous commentators on the memoranda have gotten some aspects of the material right, but their comprehensive and thorough analysis puts the whole in a new light and should prove an invaluable source for scholars in the future. In "Hume's Perceptual Relationism," Dan Kervick addresses our ideas of space and time in Book 1, part 2 of the Treatise, focusing on Hume's declaration that a vacuum is inconceivable. Kervick shows that Hume develops a novel position that negotiates between Cartesian assertions of a plenum and Newtonian endorsements of empty space. Instead of choosing between a materially full notion of extension or a notion of extension unoccupied by matter, Kervick argues that Hume is committed to a form of "perceptual relationalism," in which relations such as distance must be understood as irreducibly two-place, rather than a one-place feature of extension. It is a truly distinctive position, very much in keeping with Hume's approach to understanding space through the phenomenology of ideas. Kevin Ryan Busch's "Hume's Alleged Lapse on the Causal Maxim" turns to a familiar and ever-popular issue: Hume's argument against the necessity of attributing a cause to every event. Busch situates his discussion as a response to a criticism by Harold Noonan that Hume moves illegitimately from arguing that any event need not...

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