Abstract:

I offer a reinterpretation of Mary Shepherd’s argument against Hume for the demonstrability of the causal maxim, according to which every beginning of existence must have a cause. I focus on two overlooked hypotheses she assumes for reductio: first, that there is nothing but a “blank,” and second, that there is a “beginning of being.” Shepherd introduces these hypotheses because she reads Hume as rendering void the necessity of a first cause. On my reading, the underlying aim of her argument is to demonstrate the necessity of God’s existence. I argue that her reductio does not primarily concern the beginning of a particular existence among others without its immediate cause, but rather the beginning of being or existence in general from a blank understood as non-being, and thus without the cause that would otherwise be the very first cause. This reinterpretation clarifies why Shepherd takes the necessity of an eternal first cause to follow directly from the argument.

I first analyze the hypothesis of the “blank” and argue against Jessica Wilson’s interpretation of it as a prior empty universe. Shepherd’s descriptions of a blank as “nonentity of existence” and “non-existence,” the contrary of “existence in general,” support reading it as sheer nothingness rather than as an empty entity. This excludes space and time, since Shepherd treats them respectively as an “unresisting medium” and a “capacity in nature fitted to the continuance of any existence,” each with its own unperceived essence.

I then show that Shepherd distinguishes between the “beginning of every thing” and the “beginning of being,” rejecting only the latter as impossible because, by definition, it would be uncaused, coming from non-being. She characterizes the former as a change relative to prior being, and thus as the beginning of each thing among others within time. By contrast, the latter could not be a change from one existence to another and would also constitute the beginning of time itself. Since Shepherd herself refers to the beginning of being as a “hypothesis” that “involves a contradiction,” and since the blank means non-being, I reinterpret her argument as a reductio of the possibility that being itself begins from non-being. My reinterpretation illuminates how the argument is intended to imply the necessity of God’s existence as the “continuous Being” without beginning, from which each thing that begins to exist does so as a change.

Finally, I offer an internal critique of Shepherd’s reductio. She argues that the beginning of being from non-being is absurd because the “quality” of beginning to exist would belong to an object that is not in existence. Even granting her presupposition that beginning to exist is a quality of an object, which must be in existence to possess it, I argue that this quality would belong to the object at the very moment the object’s existence begins. Since the beginning of the object’s existence and its quality of beginning to exist are temporally indistinguishable, the alleged contradiction dissolves, and the uncaused beginning of being proves not impossible but necessary.