Hume Texts Online

Oxford Lectures on David Hume

Below are links to Peter Millican’s Hume lectures (in reverse historical order) from 2021, 2018, 2011 and 2010:

  • 2021 Lectures: “David Hume”
  • 2018 Lectures: “David Hume”
  • 2011 Lectures: “Hume’s Central Principles”
  • 2010 Lectures: “Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Book I”

The four sets of lectures have a lot of material in common, though with different emphasis. The 2010 set focused most closely on the text of Treatise Book 1 (but with a false start in section numbering: section 2 should have been combined with section 1, but I realised only later that subdividing the long following sections would be artificial). The 2011 set focused more on Hume’s central principles, with less textual ordering. The 2018 set was quite significantly revised, to reflect my later research and thinking. Thus where these sets of lectures cover the same material in similar detail, the 2018 version is to be preferred. The most notable omission from the 2018 lectures is the material on Space and Time, which is only in the 2010 version.

The 2021 lectures - which are not available in video, but have the most extensive handouts - were intended to complement and build on the 2018 lectures, rather than to supplant them (except in the case of the first lecture, which covered the same content in both sets, but was improved). These later lectures included a lot of the same slides as the 2018 set, but often I went through these very quickly, referring students back to the earlier lectures for more detail. This left time for a significant proportion of new slides that went in depth into some key issues, especially those most relevant to the Early Modern Philosophy examinations.

Lecture Handouts

The handouts for all four sets are suitable for printing with six slides per page:

Lecture Videos

The 2010 lectures were mostly divided into shorter chunks, whereas the 2011 and 2018 videos are complete lectures. As noted above, the 2021 lectures were not video recorded.

2018-19 Lectures on David Hume

2011-12 Lectures on Hume’s Central Principles

2010-11 Lectures on Hume’s Treatise, Book 1