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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From the history of ancient philosophy that we discussed yesterday we now turn to the history of modern philosophy, because a distinguished intellectual historian concerned with the latter subject, and associated with the University of Notre Dame, passed away recently and we should note the fact. Karl Ameriks is best known for his work interpreting Immanuel Kant in particular and German idealism more generally. He is known as a critic of a strict anti-realist view of Kant (or of that broader tradition). Kant is less of an anti-realist than, say, George Berkeley, on his account. Not just a different sort of anti-realist, but less of one. To explain the relative degrees of anti-realism he had in mind, Ameriks invoked a distinction between "long" arguments and "short" arguments for idealism. Here is a short argument: Any experience I have must be an experience of mine. That which is mine is subjective -- i.e. it depends upon me. Therefore, any experience I have is s...
Somewhere in his writing, I have forgotten where, William James makes a slighting reference to John Stuart Mill. It has stuck in my mind for years. James is discussing how books, plays, paintings etc. that we saw as a young person and see/experience again as an older person can offer a surprisingly novel experience, leaving us asking "how did I MISS this?". He is making broader points about the continuity (or not) of personal identity IIRC. This brings us to the shot at JSM. James says that one can come back as a mature man to Mill's writings and wonder what ever did I think was so "weighty" about them in the first place. There are several ideas of J.S. Mill's that James might at some point in his philosophic development have found enlightening. For example, Mill famously said that matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation." That comment incorporates what is valuable about George Berkeley's criticism of ideas of matter, whil...
What follows may appear to have been plagiarized from the wikipedia article on The Problem of Universals. It isn't though: I was the original author of much of that article, and the material that follows still survives there in roughly the form I originally gave it years ago. So I feel free to steal it back from myself. --------------- William James learned pragmatism, the way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead.) Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology: From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should...
Good to have him on board. Bill Nye, the "Mr Wizard" of '90s television, suggested last year that philosophy is wasted effort. In a YouTube video, he said "philosophy is important for a while," -- presumably adolescence -- but it isn't something serious people should persist in. He ended his brief YouTube discussion with the odd line, "drop the hammer on your foot and see if you don't notice it." I'm not sure what philosophical view he thought he was refuting with that one. But it was presumably in the tradition of Dr. Johnson "refuting" Berkeley. Except that even Johnson (who was being a wise-ass himself) didn't think he was responding to philosophy as a discipline. Anyway, critiques of Nye's comments appeared quickly, among them one by Olivia Goldhill that seems to have come to his attention and done some good. On April 15, 2017, Goldhill wrote on the subject of Nye-and-philosophy again, this time with a triu...
As is well known (at least in certain nerdy circles), the immaterialist philosopher George Berkeley sharply criticized Isaac Newton, and the branch of mathematics Newton had founded, in 1734. Berkeley's book of that year, THE ANALYST, said that calculus depends upon presuming that an "infinitesimal" is something at a certain point in one's reason, then assuming it is nothing at another point. That is internally incoherent. Berkeley thus earned himself a place within the usual story about calculus. The story goes -- Newton proposed certain rough-and-ready ideas, not yet fully developed. He developed them just far enough, and just deep enough, to figure out orbital mathematics. But he left holes in his reasoning. Berkeley saw the holes and called Newton out on this. Subsequent theorists re-worked the foundations to render this branch of mathematics safe from Berkeleyan assaults. That, as I say, is the usual story. In 1987, a fellow named David Sherry wrote an ar...
A participant in Yahoo!Answers recently asked this: In philosophy, how does an atheist idealist react to the criticisms faced, that Berkeley can only reply to using God? It is a provocative question, and even knowing that I was probably being too helpful regarding someone's homework assignment I couldn't refrain from a reply: I'll try to reconstruct what you mean here, then provide a three-point answer, Berkeley said material substance does not exist, matter is only the perception thereof in some mind. This raises the famous question about the tree in the Quad. Does it exist when no one is around? Berkeley says that it does still exist, and for this purpose he brings in the always-perceiving Mind of God. So what you mean to ask is: can an atheist coherently believe that Berkeley was right about the non-existence of material substance, and so the non-existence of unperceived matter, and what would THAT person have to say about the tree in the Quad? The firs...
I've recently read Galen Strawson's 2011 book, THE EVIDENT CONNEXION: HUME ON PERSONAL IDENTITY. It is a follow-up of sorts to his book on Hume's theory of causation, which I discussed in a series of posts last January. Hume believed himself to have been defeated in his efforts to explain personal identity. He says so pretty clearly in an APPENDIX he added in 1740 to his TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE, though one of Strawson's point is that many other scholars don't seem to have realized how complete the confession of failure here is. Here is Hume. I had entertain’d some hopes, that however deficient our theory of the intellectual world might be, it wou’d be free from those contradictions, and absurdities, which seem to attend every explication, that human reason can give of the material world. But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity , I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correc...
In the opening days of this year I wrote several posts inspired by Galen Strawson's book about David Hume and the issue of causation. Today, I return to that issue with simply an editorial change. I've sliced those posts together into one, and removed some unnecessary duplication or throat clearing. The result follows: THE SECRET CONNEXION (2014), by Galen Strawson, looks at David Hume's views on causation at great length, and brings in Kant in a fascinating way. Strawson has impressive credentials as a philosopher, but I'll let you look that material up for yourself. What I'll explain here is Strawson's bottom line on causation: HUME AND KANT WERE SAYING THE SAME THING. And what they were saying is a view that Strawson respects, although he doesn't quite seem to adopt it as his own. Through much of the book, Strawson makes a historical point, that Hume is often misunderstood on the issue of causation. He is seen as having denied that there is any s...
So: what was Chesterton really saying when he wrote this? "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy: he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind." ...
In a famous passage, G.K. Chesterton described the philosophy of medieval Catholicism as the common sense of the human race, the philosophy to which we all tend when we aren't poisoned by ... any of the alternatives. "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence ma...