Mary Shepherd engages some of the most hotly debated issues of the 18th and 19th centuries: in epistemology, the nature and status of causal or scientific reasoning and sensory perception; in metaphysics, the nature and status of causation and of the external world. Her systematic philosophy represents a comprehensive response to her (in)famous predecessors, most especially George Berkeley and David Hume, in much the way that Kant’s transcendental idealism does, but, unlike Kant, Shepherd is an avowed realist! We might think of Shephard’s philosophy as the realist alternative to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Shepherd’s work is contained primarily in two works, An Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824) and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827), both of which we will work through in this seminar. (Taught with Alison Simmons.)