I'm looking for Hume followers to read and comment on a paper I've written...
Hello, I've written a paper I hope to publish in a high impact philosophy journal. It is titled "Hume's Failed Attack on Newton, Causation and Geometry: A Newtonian Assessment." I'm looking for followers and advocates of Hume's metaphysics and epistemology to read my paper critically and offer comments. I want you to find any holes or weaknesses in the paper or portions that are unclear so that I can improve my paper before I submit it. If you are philosophically trained and think highly of David Hume, are you willing to take on this task?
Comments (19)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6872/humes-failed-attack-on-newtons-law-of-cause-and-effect/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6682/what-advance-in-epistemological-or-metaphysical-knowledge-did-david-hume-bring-us/p1
//oh, and you might find this Stanford article relevant (although plainly you’re past the research stage) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-newton/
Regarding the journal, the real challenge is the length of the paper. I plan to write a total of three papers contra Hume. I have completed the first draft of the first two. Both are very long. Possible journals include Philosophical Review, Synthese or Philosophers' Imprint because these accept long articles. Many of the other high impact journals have a max word length of 10,000 words and that would be very difficult.
Yes, I'm curious about this. In mathematics, academic institutions have a very powerful influence of what gets published in important journals. The reviewers are mostly faculty members or work in jobs that are roughly equivalent.
In principle it shouldn't matter, but I have often wondered how hard it is to publish without having some publication history with some affiliation, either academic or industrial, first.
Submission guidelines for all three of the journals mentioned can be viewed online, they first request a blind copy of a manuscript (i.e. from which author ID is removed), which is assessed by two or three referees prior to acceptance. But I imagine it's a pretty tough row to hoe!
I read through the entire Newton thread, really enjoyed myself. Thanks for posting those links. Before this I knew nothing of Hume, but it turns out I've been making versions of his arguments for years. From his Wiki entry, it says that
If I'm understanding his intent, he's saying that physical law is imposed on the world by us, but it's not an intrinsic or actual part of the world. I believe in the Newton thread @Ron Cram referenced a paper noting that Hume said physical law was extrinsic, not intrinsic, to the world. If I'm understanding these philosophical terms correctly, this is also what I believe. The universe does its thing and we build contingent mathematical models of whatever aspects of it we're able to observe and measure; but we're never getting at any kind of ultimate truth. Or is that too much of a distortion or simplification of what's being said?
I had one question for Ron from that thread.
Quoting Ron Cram
Are you saying that you can prove, absolutely, the falsity of Berkeley's subjective idealism, modern simulation theory, brain in a vat, and Boltzmann brains? If I read your first paper and repeated its argument to myself while I'm dreaming, could I prove that I'm not actually dreaming when I am?
Quoting counterpunch
And will this be on the test?? :-)
Oh, that's good. Physics journals take the full pre-print. I have often wondered how important the final author's name has been to my publication success record ;) A blind pre-print is an excellent idea.
Actually, that ought to read ‘cannot be justified empirically’ in my opinion. This is because his argument is that we cannot see the conjunction of cause and effect, only infer it - and inference is, after all, the fundamental activity of reason. But Hume, being a committed empiricist - ‘all knowledge is acquired through sensory experience’ - argued against inductive reason because such conjunction was not perceptible by the senses.
Kant’s response:
[quote=Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy, Kant’s Metaphysics] “Every event must have a cause” cannot be proven by experience, but experience is impossible without it because it describes the way the mind must necessarily order its representations. ... According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate [Hume’s view]. Kant’s crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed.[/quote]
(In modern parlance, subconscious - in fact I read somewhere how Kant and Schopenhauer laid the groundwork for Freud’s later ‘discovery’ of the subconscious.)
And I still think Kant is right!
The fun part is pretty Hume much agrees with Kant here: that causality is not manfest in empirical appearance (i.e. it must be a priori relation which is not granted by empirical appearance). Hume just understands the relation to be formed by existence of states, rather than being a conceptually sourced.
The blank slate is neither here nor there here because any investigation of things is occuring after the blank slate has passed. If I'm thinking about things and causes, my mind is not a blank slate. It has been filled with ideas.