An odd philosophical troika of philosophers in early modern Britain comes to mind today for no good reason. Locke, Berkeley, Hume. I saw a random post in Quora asking for a brief summary of the significant contributions of each "the" three major philosophers. No more specific context. I have no idea how one would pick THE troika the querent had in mind, But this is one troika if great significance. To summarize their “significant contributions” is a considerable task — or three different tasks, EACH considerable. But it does seem that together the three of them tell a tragic story. In essence we can say this (ignoring the politics of Locke or of Hume, and the vision theory of Berkeley): Locke: Accepted a dualist picture of the world in which minds, conceived of as properties of souls, are intangible beings that must come to grips with a material world around them. His contribution was to think through this material world in Newtonian terms — what he called...
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Hume on causation. We may define a cause to be ‘An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter.’ If this definition be esteem’d defective, because drawn from objects foreign to the cause, we may substitute this other definition in its place, viz. ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’ Treatise of Human Nature. This may lead you to reply: Huh? By "object" in the above I think we should generally understand "event." The object of the touch of a lit match to kindling is both precedent and contiguous with the ignition of that pile of kindling. There may be exceptions, as where the kindling is wet so the fire-setti...
Mary Shepherd is 'having a moment' and I am out of sympathy. Yes, I agree that many women have been written out of the history of philosophy because the history is written by men. I agree that it is worth our while to reverse this trend and recover the contributions of neglected women where we can. But Mary Shepherd, an early 19th century British thinker best known for an essay on the relation between cause and effect, doesn't really fill the bill here. In response to Hume, Shepherd wrote thus: "We cannot imagine a beginning of existence to be wholly unconnected with any thing that went before it; and this is sufficient to refute the notion, that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind." She thus infers the necessity of causal relations from our inability to imagine the contrary. This sort of thing reminds me of the scenes in The Princess Bride, where the bad guy Vizzini keeps assuring his confederates that ...
On June 6, 2024 the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Connelly v. Internal Revenue Service . This was an estate-tax issue arising in the context of closely-held corporations. Since that is already putting several of my readers to sleep, I will say only that the issue concerned a trick that controlling families sometimes use to retain their control of the corporation from one generation to the next. Let's ignore the particulars of that trick. The point is: SCOTUS held unanimously against said trick. It is a decision that will likely lead in at least some instances to some dilution of the control of certain rich and powerful families over small-but-wealth-packed corporations. So SCOTUS ruled (1) in favor of the IRS and (2) against certain rich powerful families (3) Unanimously (4) in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Who appointed these damned libs anyway? I have posted David Hume's image here to suggest that the above cited decision may be ...
Let us take another look at an issue we discussed both last week and the week before: the unity of science, and the issue of the demarcation of science from non-science. There are three intertwined ideas here we have to look at all at once: induction, causation, science. The problem of induction has been a constant in philosophy since David Hume (pictured). I can encounter a thousand white swans without ever having encountered a black swan. This should not necessarily give me confidence in the proposition "swans cannot be black". How, if at all, does the accumulation of examples produce a conclusion? Consider, too, causation. I hit a pool ball with the off-the-rack stick a thousand times. The ball always moves forward in the direction of my tap. It never blows up. Should this give me confidence in the proposition that it will never blow up? Relatedly, should this be enough for me to call my tap the cause of the ball's subsequent forward momentum? And such...
It is probably the single best known sentence Alfred North Whitehead ever wrote. It appears in the third paragraph of chapter 1 of Part II of Process and Reality. "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The next three sentences, though, give that one some important context. "I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systemization, have made his writings an inexhausible mine of suggestions." It becomes clear that Whitehead is not interested in the overly thoroughly mined Republic and, say, the myth of the cave. He is much more interested in the esoteric Timeaus as a source for...
When I have previously shared the thoughts I discussed in the two preceding blog posts, I have often got answers that can be paraphrased "but what about the Jews?" Judaism was a lively part of the east-Mediterranean thought world in which Epicurus wrote. Indeed, his lifetime coincides with the period of the creation of the great translation of their sacred literature into Greek (the Septuagint). That chronological fact comes to mind because, as I have mentioned, it is not clear on the face of it WHO Epicurus was arguing with. If he did make something like the statement Hume attributes to him, and a lot of AD 21st century memes pick up on then, as I suggested last week, he may have had Stoicism in mind. If so, he may not have understood it well. This draws the riposte: why could Epicurus not have had the monotheism of the Jews in mind? It would be good to have some context of when and why he said it -- if he wrote this in a lost text entitled "Why thos...
Hume was wrong to posit an atomistic self. The “I,” for Hume, consists solely of ideas and impressions with loose connection. But of course we aren’t loose alliances of ideas and impressions floating around. We are embodied beings, with a history and prospects for a future. Hume was reacting against the view of the soul as a transcendent and eternal Self, but he was going too far in his pendulum-like reaction
Not long ago, I wrote here about the "process theory" of causality, and attributed it to Wesley Salmon. Today, I'll go a little further, and present a quotation for Salmon's writings on the distinct but closely related question on induction, and the post-Humean debate on induction in the sciences. The idea of a philosopher discussing inductive inference in science is apt to arouse grotesque images in many minds. People are likely to imagine someone earnestly attempting to explain why it is reasonable to conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it always has done so in the past. There may have been a time when primitive man anticipated the dawn with assurance based only upon the fact that he had seen dawn follow the blackness of night as long as he could remember, but this primitive state of knowledge, if it ever existed, was unquestionably prescientific. This kind of reasoning bears no resemblance to science; in fact, the crude induction exhibit...
A well-known popularizer of philosophy has passed away. Bryan Magee died on July 16 in a hospital after a long illness. Magee was the author of MEN OF IDEAS (1982), PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD (1985), CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER (1997), and WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY (2001), etc. He was a great popularizer of philosophy for non-academic audiences, adept at breaking down complex problems into their component parts and presenting them in ordinary (and non-patronizing!) prose. It was Magee's view that Immanuel Kant brought about "the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy," and that Kant was right to compare it to the turning produced by Copernicus in astronomy. Magee wrote, "Because of the fundamental character of these problems [unearthed by Kant], and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since." However well expressed it may be, I don't believe that. ...
I don't know off hand whether I've ever had reason before to mention Nicolas Malebranche, a great though idiosyncratic post-Cartesian French philosopher, in this blog. I think I may have mentioned him once, in connection with theodicy, i.e. his efforts to make the case for God's goodness despite the evil in the world God created. But today I've like to say something about a more fundamental issue in Malebranche's thinking: the nature of causation. Malebranche said (1) that material things can't be the cause of themselves (they can't be fundamental), (2) minds are composed of ideas, raising the question of whether ideas can be fundamental, but (3) finite minds such as our own cannot account for the operation of physical laws in the world they quite imperfectly observe. Therefore (4) only an infinite mind, God's mind, can ground causal relations such as physical laws. All laws are only generalizations of the actions of God's mind, and for ...
I'd like to present today, without further ado, something David Hume wrote about the Tories and the Whigs of his day. As no party, in the present age can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues. ... The one party [defenders of the absolute and divine right of kings, or Tories], by tracing up government to the DEITY, endeavor to render it so sacred and inviolate that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party [the Whigs, or believers in constitutional monarchy], by founding government altogether on the consent of the PEOPLE suppose that there is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserv...
I somewhat regret having been so perfunctory in my discussion of Kant in my book on the history of modern philosophy. I've been making up for that lately on Quora, posting repeatedly on matters Kantian. Here I am getting all pedantic full throttle when another Quora denizen asked the meaning and significance of the phrase "synthetic a priori." ---------------- There are two different dichotomies involved. First, for Kant, (following Hume here), some propositions are synthetic and others are analytic. Roughly speaking, synthetic propositions refer to the objective world, whereas analytic propositions describe the concepts/tools that I may use to grapple with the world. In other words, if we think of knowing-the-world as watching a football game, then synthetic means “about the game and its outcome,” whereas analytic means “about what counts as a ‘point’ and what counts as a ‘win’ etc.” Secondly, taking from thinkers like Leibniz, Kant sees so...