1. The medium
of the blog never fails to astonish me.
I pour my heart out in a series of deadly serious multi-part on-line
essays, some as much as 30,000 words in length, and the response is quiet, respectful, rather muted. I post two brief, humorous
remarks, one about the Manafort trial and the other evoking some phrases from
the Watergate era, and instantaneously there is a blizzard of comments, the
first eliciting 19 and the second 22. Perhaps
the Zen Buddhists have it right – less is more.
2. I try to
follow Michelle Obama’s advice and go high when my opponents go low, I really
do. But I am only human. So I must confess that the pictures of Eric
and Donald Jr. inspire me with loathing.
I do understand that we must not judge people by their looks, and as
someone who has been afflicted all his life with a disfiguring array of facial
tics and involuntary grimaces, I take this caution to heart. But I really, really yearn to see those smug
smiles wiped off the faces of the Trump boys.
That moment may be approaching.
3. Rather
unexpectedly, in the midst of the discussion about the decision of the Manafort
jury, a mini-dispute broke out about the epistemological views of David Hume. I must confess that I did not expect things
to turn in that direction, but since they have, let me say a few words about
some ways in which modern readers tend to misunderstand the Treatise of Human Nature.
Hume is perhaps most famous for his refutation of the claims
made for causal inference, a refutation that takes no more than a portion of
one paragraph of Section 3, part iii of Book I of the Treatise, a section with the title “Why a Cause is Always
Necessary.” In that section, Hume offers
a brief but devastating critique of causal inference, and his argument is
justly famous. But Hume is not a
pyrrhonian sceptic of the ancient Greek sort, as he makes explicitly
clear. Most of part iii is actually devoted
to an imaginative, albeit somewhat speculative, explanation of our natural
tendency to believe causal reasoning, a tendency that he has absolutely no
interest in undermining. Hume would have
understood and approved the charge to the jury that they must decide whether a defendant
is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
He coins the phrase “natural belief” to describe our inescapable human
belief in causal judgments. As Hume
says, famously, in section 1 of part iv, "belief is more properly an act of the
sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary and creative part of Hume’s
argument is found in the very next section of part iv, which extends uncharacteristically
for 31 pages. Hume argues there that
even after we have accepted causal inference as an ineliminable component of
our mental processes, we must still recognize that our belief in the continued
and independent existence of objects goes beyond anything that causal reasoning
can establish. This is, in my judgment,
the philosophically most interesting section of the Treatise, a view that was shared, I think, by some early twentieth
century British empiricist philosophers, most notably H. H. Price.
3 comments:
For myself, Book III is the most philosophically interesting part of the Treatise.
Since your writing about philosophy ...
I'm reading "Beyond the Limits of Thought" by Graham Priest (2002). On page 81,in a section about Kant, he writes "A number of perceptive commentators have noted the similarity between noumena .. and prime matter.", citing Wolff (1963), p152 n
And on the evidence of your blog, still a perceptive commentator.
Graeme
The recent discussion of Hume on this site set me thinking about an infamous note that Hume made in connection with his essay, “Of National Characters.” In that note, Hume expresses the suspicion that Africans are “naturally inferior to” Europeans. He gives various reasons for this suspicion and then, at the end of the note, he expresses the doubt that any African could be, as he puts it in now-quaint 18th century terms, “a man of parts and learning.” No Enlightenment for them. No invitations to ‘the Party of Humanity.’ Hume doubts reports that there are (or can be?) cultured blacks, in one of the most striking lines I’ve read in his works: “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” This is no longer a sentiment that can be held or expressed by a decent, intelligent, and psychologically normal person. Only an unhinged bigot would today believe such a thing, let alone publicly admit and argue for it. But Hume evidently did believe it (I thought of all this when I read the discussions on this blog about Hume’s epistemology—a very large part of which is about the nature of belief). If Hume were around today, I’m certain that he wouldn’t believe this. But what Hume said has the permanence of print, and he’s stuck with that. Our moral sense seems really to change with history, and it seems to me there’s no getting outside of this. Jefferson today would not have the racial views of the actual Jefferson, and Burke wouldn’t write off most of humanity as “the swinish multitudes.”
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