Why Is Hume So Hot Right Now?
Okay, the title refers to this article.
It seems that among today's Philosophy Academia, Hume is dominating as a favourite philosopher - the one most academics identify with (to be more precise). I've posted below the results:
Yet, on this forum, we have quite different results it seems. We don't have an exact poll, but:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/876/4th-poll-the-most-important-modern-philosopher/p1
It seems our community here is dominated by rampant Kantianism (or its offshoots).
1. Why the divergence? Why is Hume seen so highly by Academics, and yet it doesn't trickle down to us amateurs? I don't know if Jamal can retrieve statistics regarding the top favorite philosophers by listings on our profiles, but I don't expect Hume to be anywhere near "winning" here. I don't know anyone here who identifies with Hume most for example (maybe Sappy, or one of the other atheists :P ).
2. Does the Academic appreciation of Hume reflect honest philosophical consideration, or is it merely determined by the Academia's leftist/atheist bias?
It seems that among today's Philosophy Academia, Hume is dominating as a favourite philosopher - the one most academics identify with (to be more precise). I've posted below the results:
Yet, on this forum, we have quite different results it seems. We don't have an exact poll, but:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/876/4th-poll-the-most-important-modern-philosopher/p1
It seems our community here is dominated by rampant Kantianism (or its offshoots).
1. Why the divergence? Why is Hume seen so highly by Academics, and yet it doesn't trickle down to us amateurs? I don't know if Jamal can retrieve statistics regarding the top favorite philosophers by listings on our profiles, but I don't expect Hume to be anywhere near "winning" here. I don't know anyone here who identifies with Hume most for example (maybe Sappy, or one of the other atheists :P ).
2. Does the Academic appreciation of Hume reflect honest philosophical consideration, or is it merely determined by the Academia's leftist/atheist bias?
Comments (64)
Does your question reflect honest philosophical consideration, or is it merely determined by your rightist/theist bias?
"There's no necessary connection between sense-experiences and material objects." -- > external world skepticism
"There's no necessary connection between memories and past events." -- > skepticism about the past
"There's no necessary connection between past events and future events." -- > problem of induction
"I never perceive myself." -- > skepticism about the self
... and what solution did Hume offer to these skeptical problems? "Let's hit the club, guys!"
Boring philosopher, indeed.
Cause it's almost summer? Maybe he likes to vacation in tropical locales? Despite being long gone, Hume is fumin'! There's nothing he Kant do. Just surprised Bill Russell and Lou Rawls didn't score higher. :D
I love Hume. I love him for:
Anglo survey, no? Perhaps Anglo/American at best.
Limits are not necessarily borders to something else, but simply limits beyond which there is nothing more to expect.
Or maybe the coherency of Hume's arguments is a reason for Academia's leftist/atheist "bias"?
Regarding Hume I think it would have been more apposite if you had written "limits within which there is nothing more to expect".
Well, to be clear, my post was actually not regarding Hume but andrewk's idea that Hume's identification of the limits of reason thereby opened the door to mysticism. Perhaps there is a different sense in which Hume opened a door to mysticism, but from identifying a limit it does not follow a border nor a door to something beyond reason, i.e. mysticism.
I agree that nothing Hume says entails mysticism, but I think andrewk's point was probably: that since, according to Hume, we can know only representations of phenomena, and can never know what, if anything, ls at work 'behind' phenomena, then the door is therefore open to mysticism.
Yes.
You're comparing a sample size of 22 to a sample size of 1,077.
Well I'm comparing our community with the Academia. Of course our community is going to be much smaller than the Academia, I am aware of that :)
Realism, Phenomenology, Idealism, Analytic Philosophy. The term 'Realism' was significantly more sought than any of the others....Phenomenology and Idealism basical the same results and Analytic Philosophy trailing.
I think speculative realism is popular in academia and most of these philosopher trace their roots back to Hume.
I wouldn't say that I most identify with Hume. I most identify with Russell, even though I disagree with him plenty. And then I probably also identify more with Quine, Davidson, Nozick, Searle, McGinn, Ayer, maybe Feyerabend, Varzi, Reichenbach, Mach and some others, not necessarily in that order.
But Hume is definitely a favorite, and if the task is to pick a favorite philosopher pre the late 19th century, Hume is easily my #1. In my opinion there was a huge percentage of crap philosophy prior to the late 19th century. (And there still is, but there's a lot of good stuff, too.) Ironically Hume isn't my favorite pre-late 19th century author--Plato is--but the problem is that as entertainingly as Plato wrote, his philosophical conclusions were ridiculously wrong the vast majority of the time.
At least Heidegger and some others if that ilk didn't even make the poll.
Anyway, yeah, re popular philosophers and views here, and typically on boards like this, my tastes, dispositions, views are not at all the norm. I don't know why that is, but it can be frustrating to me. On the other hand, it's also better fodder for commenting, and it can be more challenging to me, which are good things.
Yeah, because most people who hear about philosophy will hear about these four generally. They're the first names one comes across.
Are they exact match searches? Or would a search for "anti realism" be counted towards "realism"?
This info is also shown geographically:
Yes, but those are just Hume's metaphysical positions. There's more to Hume than that. Two other factors I can think of:
• Ethics
• Philosophy of Religion
Those both relate to his metaphysics. Hume breaks with (religious) metaphysical tradition to basically deny necessity. He splits the existing world (finite, empirical) from the necessary (infinite, logical, meaning), such that representations of the world no longer show events which are necessary. The world is no longer governed by eternal (and transcendent) rules or traditions. It might do anything, even if its unethical or breaks completely with what humans might expect. We simply can't look at the world in front of us, or one an idea we've thought, and conclude it is what must be going forward.
In terms of transcendent (and religious) metaphysical traditions, Hume is one of the few ultimate atheists in the history of philosophy. Looking at his metaphysics, we might actually call him a 17th century Nietzsche, blowing apart the basis of every transcendent (and religious) tradition before modernists thought it was edgy and cool, though Hume perhaps wasn't completely aware of it.
He may not be so popular among the Incontinent-als because, in accordance with Hume's so-called "fork':
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
most of their works would have been seen by him as being worthy of being burnt.
That's because if you adopt his attitude to philosophy, there's nothing at stake. It is a purely critical enterprise, wholly concerned with puncturing what philosophy is normally taken to be. Therefore you have nothing to defend, and you can simply attack.
Hume wrote his famous book as a young man. I believe that in later life, he devoted considerable time to baccalaureate.
Well not necessarily, but you do away with metaphysics, and get busy with the practicalities of life. It's not necessarily bad. A lot of metaphysics is stuff that is ultimately irrelevant to life anyways.
Quoting Wayfarer
Baccalaureate? You mean he went around looking under girl's skirts like a bachelor? :-O
And what about Hamann? Hamann became a theist because of Hume.
Quoting Agustino
Thanks Captain Obvious :P
It was backgammon.
Quoting Agustino
Only discovered him via your posts. Probably not within scope of my syllabus, but I can't help but like his notion of 'Prosopopoeia'.
How much of today's 'identity politics', which pervades the entire sphere of culture and commentary, is derived from that, eh? ;-)
That's true. He thought that reason leads inevitably to skepticism, and that Kant's project of rational faith via practical reason was misconceived.
I remember something said by Bertrand Russell (I think it was Russell) which went roughly like this:
"Hume may have awoken Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but it didn't take him long to go back to sleep".
Although Russell would not have agreed at all with Hamann's assessment regarding faith, this seems quite apposite to Hamann's standpoint.
I think Hamann saw skepticism and dogmatism as being the only two real alternatives for reason, anything else would be, for him, an illusory dream of reason and would turn out to be nothing more than another dogmatism in disguise.
I very much doubt Russell would have said anything like that.
Quoting Agustino
Hume used the same boring trick in ethics too.
"There's no necessary connection between an 'is' and an 'ought'" -- > skepticism about morality
Hume was a one-trick pony.
As I said. I am not sure it was Russell, but I am quite sure it was one of the analytic or positivist philosophers. Russell was no great admirer of Kant, if my memory of the chapter on Kant in his history of philosophy is any indication (although it is probably more than twenty years since I read that. In any case what makes you say you don't think he would have said that?
I don't think being a workaholic contradicts being in a dogmatic slumber. As to his ideas constantly changing; that may have been so during his pre-critical phase; but there doesn't seem to be much evidence that they changed significantly after that. Also the philosopher already referred to: Hamann (whom Goethe referred to as "the brightest mind of his day) thought that Kant's philosophy constituted dogma, so it can hardly be blithely said that that judgement is self-evidently wrong.
>:O Fine, but that's not Hume's only contribution to ethics. Three main ones that come to mind:
• "Reason is only a slave to the passions".
• Virtue is a coverup for utility (virtue is what brings social utility - not that I agree with the idea, but it's Hume's contribution, esp. with regards to justice).
• Morals arising from sentiments, not reason.
And whom Hegel referred to as a "penetrating genius" and Kierkegaard called, along with Socrates, "perhaps [the] most brilliant minds of all time". Hamann's greatness consist principally in:
• Understanding reason as emerging from tradition, and thus never being wholly independent of it.
• Foreshadowing the dependence of reason upon language - something that only fully comes into focus with Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• Comprehending that skepticism with regards to reason and metaphysics is as equally theistic as it is atheistic.
•Anticipating the fideism of S. Kierkegaard and breaking out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment:
More here on page 202-206.
• Located freedom in creativity and artistic expression.
Quoting John
The problem with reason, for Hamann, was that reason set the standards, and then installed itself as some kind of tribunal that had the authority to judge and decide on how things stand. But reason itself was the contingent product of language and tradition - reason was historical (an idea further explored by Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein). So Hamann recognised that we cannot think outside of reason - BUT the bounds of reason are determined historically, and therefore our thinking ability itself is limited - man is finite. In certain epochs certain truths are obscured - there is no perfect rationality, when something is revealed, something else becomes hidden (Heidegger) - so the march of reason (The Enlightenment) is alike the horse chasing the carrot. According to Hamann, Kant too was fooled by reason, and didn't go far enough. Hamann offered a better and stronger critique of pure reason than Kant.
Hamann's genius was in realising that even if skepticism holds, that doesn't mean we're cursed to be atheists (contra Hume). On the contrary, we are free to listen to our hearts. If the uncertainty of reason enables one to believe that there is no God, then certainly it is this same uncertainty that enables one to believe that there is a God. As Pascal had said, there is enough light for those who want to believe, and enough darkness for those who don't.
Hamann, perhaps more than any other, understood Hume's distinction between true religion, and false religion. False religion is a matter of argument and reason. True religion is a matter of the heart.
That is called 'historicism'. Reason is sovereign, because it is the standard that truth claims are obliged to meet, not because it is imbued with some authority on external grounds.
Who decides that it's the standard that truth claims are obliged to meet? Reason? That's like playing at the Casino - the House always wins (because it sets the rules).
In order to even start to tackle a topic as big as 'the nature of reason', is going to take far more time than you or me or anyone else here is likely to have. But go back to the origins of the rationalist tradition, with Pythagoras and the other Greek philosophers. Their entire effort was to discover the reason, ratio, why things occur as they do, what is the order of things, what are the causal regularities that enable us to make predictions which the hoi polloi could never grasp. They could 'see reason', they could understand why things are they way they are. That was the origin of the rationalist tradition.
The problem, in my view, is that reason has become debased by scientific materialism, which claims that only those things which can be measured by scientific instruments and quantified according to known science, will be considered. Kant was well aware of that, he was trying to ground morality in something more compelling than 'following the heart', which after all anyone can say in respect of anything they do. I personally don't care much for Kant's deontological ethics, but I think he did understand the problem posed by the appropriation of reason by science.
More a regular conjunction of events than a coincidence. He simply observed that, whereas logical propositions or deductive truths, are true by virtue of definition, inductive truths are only true by virtue of the fact that effect always appears to follow from cause. But there's no logical reason why that is so, it is purely observational. So an inductive claim that 'all crows are black', is sound - right up until a white crow is observed.
But why would a conjunction of events be regular? Did he think there are regularities like the law of gravitation?
When we say that 'a causes b' - how do we know this? Usually all we have to go on is that every time it's observed, then a causes b. But is there a logical warrant for the supposition that a must always cause b, or is it simply custom? And what possible answer to that could there be to that question? How can you show that a must always cause b, as a matter of logical necessity. You can't prove that a must cause b, in the sense of providing a logic or mathematical proof. What is the warrant for induction, other than the customary association of effects with causes (and so on)? Those were the questions he was considering.
Thanks for linking the book: I downloaded it and will be able to have a read later.
I agree with all the points above. According to Frederick Beiser in The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte ( https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Reason-German-Philosophy-Fichte/dp/067429503X) Kant's main concern was with exposing the assumptions and limitations of rationalism from Plato to Leibniz and Wolfe. Beiser cites Kant as believing that all rationalist philosophy must, if followed to its logical conclusion, result in Spinozism; which in turn must result in atheism.
Kant rejected the central claim of rationalist philosophy: that reality must be as reason tells us. However his mistake, according to Hamann and others, consisted in claiming that experience and reason itself must be as reason tells us. If rationalism accepted, leads to dogma, and rationalism rejected to skepticism, then Kant's dogmatic assertion that reason and experience must be as reason tells us they are, gives rise, ironically, to the possibility of yet another layer of skepticism.
Fichte, Maimon, Hegel, Schelling and others all recognized this fatal flaw in Kant's system, and tried in their various ways to 'heal the rift' and reinstate an accord between reality and reason, expressed best in Hegel's "the Rational is the Real". Interestingly Hegel acknowledged that Kant had failed to recognize the historicity and the dialectical nature of reason and his solution to the puzzle consisted in making the Real, or Spirit, itself into an historical, dialectical becoming.
Hume's skepticism, if taken to its logical conclusion, would result in skepticism of memory; so we could have no warrant for claiming that the apple has always been observed to fall down, either.
Really? I must say I find that surprising. I would think he is not a skeptic in the radical Pyrrhonic sense, or at least doesn't see himself as such; but I think if you take his assumptions to logical conclusion you will end up with radical skepticism.
But it seems he at least acknowledged there are stable regularities in nature. To me this seems the same as acknowledging there are laws in nature, even though it is unknown whether they will continue to hold in the future.
I suppose so, although I don't know if he thought in those terms. In any case, Russell comments, in his entry on Hume in the HWP, that Hume's scepticism tended to undermine the authority of science.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hume is very much part of the tradition of scepticism, although nowadays scepticism is usually associated with 'scientific scepticism' which is very different from traditional philosophical scepticism.
Atheism as a proposition/conclusion, or atheism as a subjective emotional/rational/spiritual experience?
You could probably produce a zillion papers, conferences, books, etc. with irrefutable arguments and evidence about the benefits of coffee, but all that would do is tell me that the available arguments and evidence dictate that coffee has benefits. It would not change my experience of coffee--the fact that other than one time around the age of 10, I have never drank it. Even if I did start drinking it, I doubt that arguments and evidence about its benefits are going to have much of an effect on what I experience.
On the other hand, if mind over matter is real then I suppose arguments and evidence could rearrange one's neurological material and make him/her an atheist. And arguments and evidence could rearrange my neurological material and make me crave and enjoy coffee.
If the latter two are possible, then doesn't reason disappear? Don't we then only have a physicalist/materialist world of interactions leading to mental and emotional states like "atheist" and "enjoying coffee"? Wouldn't saying that the latter and the former are arrived at through some external thing called reason be like saying that vapor condenses into rain through some external thing called reason?
Meanwhile, if atheism is a proposition/conclusion like 2 + 2 = 4, doesn't that make atheism a triviality?
I can see the issue you have in mind, and interesting though it might be, it isn't what I was concerned with. I take Kants' assertion that rationalism ends up in Spinozism, and ultimately atheism, to be addressing what he though to be merely it's inevitable logical conclusion.
Whether we would find ourselves convinced by Spinozism and atheism would depend firstly on whether we accepted rationalist first principles, secondly on whether we were convinced that Spinozism and atheism were in fact inevitable logic concomitants of rationalist first principles, and thirdly on whether we were the sort of people whose beliefs are ultimately determined by logical arguments.
As to the third, I suppose it might be fair to say that if we were the kind of people who accepted rationalist first principles, then we would find our beliefs determined by rational arguments, so it's really back to the second condition; whether or not we find the logic train of though leading to that conclusion consistent.
Hume is one of my least favorites. I've started a thread and I'm hoping fans of Hume will come answer a question for me and join the discussion.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6682/what-advance-in-epistemological-or-metaphysical-knowledge-did-david-hume-bring-us
I'm not a fan of David Hume. I started a thread about Hume and would love for you to join the conversation.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6682/what-advance-in-epistemological-or-metaphysical-knowledge-did-david-hume-bring-us
I am not a fan of Hume. I just started a thread on Hume and I'm hoping that both fans and anti-fans would come join the conversation.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6682/what-advance-in-epistemological-or-metaphysical-knowledge-did-david-hume-bring-us