The Secret Connexion, Part III

Continuing the line of thought from yesterday and the day before....

So far in this discussion I've quoted Hume only once, that bit from the Enquiry about how "we are ignorant of those powers and forces" etc. So here are a couple of other quotes used by Strawson in laying out his broad thesis. From the Treatise he quotes, "[I am] ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted."

Note the duality, "material and immaterial." One of Strawson's underlying points is that Hume considered Berkeley's metaphysics a plausible one -- neither certain nor probable, but coherent and on its own terms irrefutable. Berkeley saw the world as consisting of a God, various human minds, and the ideas that God implants into their/our minds. These ideas include the entire sensory world, including the regularities we might describe as examples of causality. Berkeley too, then, believes in a separation between causation lower-case and Causation. In causation, a first sensory event (a) precedes another (b) and we say that a caused b -- the hand that dropped the ball in that action caused the ball to fall to the ground. In the deeper meaning, Causation, the first and second sensory events are both given us/caused/produced by the Divine Mind directly. All reality is immaterial and true Cause likewise.

Hume didn't endorse that view, but he always took it into account. This even shows up in the wording of statements that seem only tangentially related. Consider Philo, Hume's mouthpiece in the Dialogues, arguing against the inference that a supernatural intelligence must have created the world. Philo says there are at least two possibilities, "For aught we can know a priori, matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself ... there is no more difficulty in conceiving, that the several elements, from an internal unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas, in the great, universal mind, from a like internal unknown cause, may fall into that arrangement., The equal possibility of both these suppositions is allowed."

Consider the language in which Philo allows for the theistic supposition. It isn't a matter of God as an architect creating a material world. Rater, it is of God, as the great universal mind, falling into a particular "arrangement" of His own "ideas" which corresponds to the "most exquisite arrangement" in which we find things. That's a rather Berkelayan wording of the possibility of a world with God at its heart.

One common trope in the history of philosophy takes Berkeley, Hume, and Kant as a triptych of epistemological and metaphysical warriors, each setting out to overthrow the one before, to become the new champion. In a sense Strawson takes over this trope. Berkeley and Kant are both referenced quite often in this book centered on Hume. BUT ... Strawson sees their relations differently.

Just as Hume respectfully incorporates the possibility of a Berkeleyan world into his writing, so Hume anticipates Kant's distinction between noumenal and phenomenal worlds. In Strawson's view, these three aren't contending warriors, they are allies, the Three Amigos of philosophy!

And with that happy thought I conclude my discussion of this Christmas gift.

Well, sort of. I'll have some thoughts tomorrow that go beyond Strawson and further into this Three-Amigos conception.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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