Philosopher
Mary Shepherd
1777–1847
Scottish philosopher whose essays on cause and effect answered Hume, arguing that causes necessarily produce their effects and that reason, not habit, grounds our knowledge of an external world.
Mary Shepherd grew up near Edinburgh on her family’s estate, where a private tutor taught her Latin, geography, mathematics and history and discussed some philosophy with her; as a student she wrote essays finding fault with the reasoning of Hume and Priestley. A controversy in Edinburgh in 1802, in which Thomas Brown defended Hume from accusations of atheism, left a lasting mark, and she later cited it as a reason for writing.
Her books, published after her marriage in 1808, were highly regarded in her day, and one was reportedly taught from at Cambridge. Her system, in which sensation and understanding combine to give knowledge, has been compared to Kant’s more than to those of the British empiricists she answered.
Key ideas
- Nothing begins without a cause
- Against Hume, an uncaused change in nature is impossible, and Shepherd set out to prove that whatever begins to exist must be caused. Our causal beliefs come from perception and reasoning, not from repetition and habits of imagination.
- Like causes, like effects
- Like causes must have like effects. Reason establishes this principle, which Shepherd called “the foundation of all our knowledge”, and the basic causal principles regulate every opinion, theoretical and practical.
- Cause and effect are simultaneous
- Cause and effect are bound by efficacy, necessity and simultaneity. Her ontology of basic capacities and powers anticipates recent theories that identify the properties of natural kinds with powers or dispositions.
- Knowing an external world
- Sensation and understanding work together: the senses receive impressions, and the understanding deploys ideas of things distinct from them. Causal reasoning then explains how we know there are objects outside us.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Edinburgh and London
- Period
- Late modern
- Themes
- Causation
Influences
Where these links come from
- Mary Shepherd argued against David Hume. Source: Martha Bolton, Mary Shepherd, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, 1824
- Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, 1827
Sources
- Martha Bolton, Mary Shepherd, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy