Kant and/or Hume
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Meet the idealists
[excerpt from World as Idea] We have already met one idealist – Kant, who claimed that by the point at which we are conscious of experience, it has been shaped into a certain order in just the way a lecturer prepares his notes. Indeed, Kant believed that the human mind is very ambitious in its Continue reading
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Hegelian vs. Kuhnian idealism
[from an essay in progress on idealism] What we have seen so far is that there is no observation of the world, and no understanding of it, without a theory. We have also met several idealists who believe, in varying ways and for different reasons, that theory is not just important, but really, really important: Continue reading
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Krug’s pen
Wilhelm Traugott Krug (1770-1842) was the philosopher who succeeded Kant in the chair for logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. Just before taking on that role, he had thrown down a challenge for Schelling’s idealist philosophy: could Schelling, or any idealist, pretend to offer any sort of explanation why, from the Absolute, any Continue reading
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Experiencing the moment
David Hume, that most sly student of human experience, declared he couldn’t find himself anywhere. As he gazed inward, he came across sensations, feelings, passions, and moods, but he had never come across aself in the way one might come across a vivid shade of turquoise or a lampshade or a heartbeat. He could find Continue reading
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Learning from Hume; or, Hume and Particle Physics
Philosophy students are typically taught the wrong lesson from the great Scottish skeptic David Hume. The standard story goes something like this. British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley wanted to connect everything we know to what we experience through the senses. The welcome consequence of this strategy is that all the stuff we see and Continue reading
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On appreciating systems
How wonderful it would be to be a systematic thinker! One marvels at the Aristotles, the Aquinases, the Descarteses, the Kants, and the Hegels and the Marxes (well, the Karl Marxes anyway), the Freuds – those who know how to approach anything, how to incorporate any material into a systematic empire, those who can see Continue reading
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David Hume – the “Assassin’s Assessor”
Edinburgh’s “Poker Club” began meeting in 1762. Each week, fifty or so gentlemen would congregate in a tavern for a long afternoon followed by dinner and argue events of the day ranging from politics to morals and culture – matters like national characters, standards of taste, what makes for a good theatrical tragedy, whether all Continue reading
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Sloterdijk, Hume, and a healthy skepticism
As I work through the recent works of Peter Sloterdijk (Spheres I: Bubbles, Spheres II: Globes), I am chiefly amazed and enthused by his ability to find deep symbolic and mythic connections throughout the history of philosophical thought, and to use that understanding to bring our culture into a startlingly fresh relief. His insights make Continue reading
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More musings on Humean causality
We expect that causal laws will be the same across all experience. Hume famously claims that this expectation is grounded neither in pure reason nor in experience. Not pure reason: for one can posit a cause and deny the effect without being contradictory. And not in experience: for all experience can ever show is what Continue reading
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Hume and the expedition to Canada
In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last Continue reading
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Hume falls into a bog, promises his way out
At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn’t something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to Continue reading
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Review of Phillipson’s Hume
Review of Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Many people know of David Hume the great empiricist, the skeptic of causality, and the architect of a moral system based on natural sentiments. But in his own day, Hume was most famous as an historian and political analyst. This book helps us by Continue reading
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Hume and causality
(Note: I’ve decided to start posting some lectures I’ve written out, under the new category “from the old yellowed notes”.) We can examine our lives from the inside or from the outside. From the inside we jump from thought to thought, from sensation to sensation, with memories mixing in with new ideas, interrupted by our Continue reading
Huenemanniac 