Abstract

For Descartes, duration is an attribute of everything that takes up time. Things with duration have successive temporal parts. Hume agrees that duration entails succession. However, his skeptical empiricism constrains him from attributing duration to everything that takes up time. To all appearances, some things—steadfast objects—take up time without being successive. Seeing Hume’s idiosyncratic view as a successor to Descartes’s under skeptical empiricist constraints makes Hume’s easier to understand and appreciate.