Hume identifies the idea of time with the idea of succession and denies that we have or even can have an idea of time without change.  He argues that our idea of time is not applicable to unchanging objects and that unchanging objects cannot be said to endure.  At the center of Hume’s treatment of time is a fiction that is supposed to explain how we falsely believe that we can form an idea of time without change and how we consider unchanging objects to endure. The literature has struggled to make sense of Hume’s riddled arguments and obscure claims.  Against the background of Hume’s intention to establish a new foundation for the sciences, we consider the most important and controversial texts from the perspective of Hume’s likely target: the idea of absolute time.  From this perspective, we offer important insights into the questions that have dominated the literature.

In his brief treatment of memory, Hume characterizes memory using two kinds of criteria: ideas' phenomenal character and their correspondence to the past experiences from which they derived. These criteria have seemed so perplexing to interpreters, both individually and jointly, that Hume's account of memory is commonly considered one of the weakest parts of his philosophical system. This paper defends Hume's criteria by showing that they achieve two theoretical aims: a scientific classification of ideas and a definition of ‘memory.’ In particular, I argue that Hume's definition of ‘memory’ is cogent in light of Putnamian considerations about definitions.

Most philosophers agree that an argument's presentation is relevant to its philosophical merit. This paper explains why David Hume considered presentation philosophically important. On Hume's epistemology, presentation is closely connected with two principal aims of philosophical arguments: persuasion and epistemic justification. Hume's views imply that presentation is a factor determining an argument's persuasiveness and that, by philosophical standards of justification, presentation is also a factor determining the extent to which an argument's conclusion is justified.