Yeah, Hume tends to assume a kind of uncritical naturalism when it suits him, which is in tension with his anti-naturalistic epistemological views. Bu...
I read Hume as given a psychological explanation for human behavior in the face of uncertainty, not a reasoned justification for it (his position seem...
An omission of ignorance isn't a failure of reconciliation. It's possible to believe in Newtonian mechanics because you take its effects to be observa...
Is it the historical reconstruction that's compelling, or Kant's viewpoints in response to it? I'm willing to grant the former (though I don't know – ...
I guess I don't think he was that innocent. Kant seemed to be engaged in a project of permanently entrenching certain prejudices (religious, scientifi...
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He had a narrow philosophical upbringing, and those he learned from dealt with linguistic proble...
The best philosophy I've seen is that which accumulates a tradition and tries to respond to it as thoroughly as possible, like the Outlines of Pyrrhon...
That the tradition prevents me from understanding Kant as he would have been understood in the 18th century I think is a very charitable way to look a...
That's just not true though. I gave reasons in my very responses to you. Kant does not, so far as I can tell, have arguments for the position that we ...
That's my point, though. It doesn't seem like argumentation helps. It's not a convincing principle, yet psychologically people find it so. If you trie...
I don't think it much matters what Kant's specific opinions are: the point is just that the 'we can't get outside our X' claim doesn't, so far as I ca...
What if what Kant said was simplistic and problematical? Of course we don't want to believe that because we sunk a lot of time into reading him. But w...
It's true that at any particular moment, our capacities will be whatever they are. But the passage of time allows them to be expanded, or changed, suc...
Not that I can see. It's obvious that we can learn to think about things in new ways. So why isn't this getting out of our faculties to compare them t...
It could mean, for example, learning something you didn't know before. We constantly acclimate to new ways of thinking due to outside influences shapi...
Kant's claims are absurd once you begin to think about them a bit, and he himself starts to crack a little when he talks about the noumenon as negativ...
The problem is more just that we do get outside our conceptual schemes every day, and in fact it would really be hard to live ordinary life if we coul...
Have you, though? We like to think we learn from philosophy, but after it's done it's hard to say what if anything we have. I think it goes double for...
I agree these are good questions, but IMO philosophy has nothing to say about them and generally serves as a propaganda arm for whatever the reigning ...
No, I'm really starting to think that humans are just not smart enough for it. Not by much – we can sort of grasp what a good argument is like, at lea...
Most of the questions I used to care about don't 'get under my skin' any more, but I think they're generally legitimate and difficult, as almost all t...
Maybe. I think Berkeley's philosophy suffers from a false loyalty to common sense. There is nothing commonsensical about Barkeley's ideas, even if the...
Does Berkeley ever claim that our ideas of the Pepsi bottle are identical? I don't recall that. Wasn't his point just that we commonly speak of things...
Indeed. I take Berkeley's point to be that the 'vulgar' notion of identity is unlike the philosopher's, and that it shifts depending on the convenienc...
It's not so much that Hume is ruthlessly analytical, but rather that the whole of his thought seems reducible to a single analytical move, applied rel...
Hume noted that the theory was unsatisfactory because he wasn't able to coherently characterize the notion of a bundle by his own lights. That is, he ...
The point is, though, that he didn't. His philosophy ended with no account of personal identity or separation, continuity, or the coherence of any two...
My concern right now is more just with realism generally – hedonism seems to be a type of moral realism. I think some sort of case can be made for hed...
The best thing to do would probably be to try to reduce our disagreement to a more fundamental one, to find out whether one of us was being inconsiste...
No. Is there a difference between determining something and objectively determining something? Clearly I can determine it, and so can you, since we al...
Wrong about what? That what they did was pleasant to them? No that's just a fact. That what they did was okay? If they thought that, then clearly they...
But that's not true at all. For example, I can say 'I bet/hope that painting is beautiful – so I hope someone gets to see it!' and this makes perfect ...
I think an individual can see whether an object is beautiful by beholding it, but that the object is beautiful doesn't mean that their beholding it ma...
Is there a difference between there being a truth to the matter, and an objective truth to the matter? Claiming there's no truth to the matter would s...
But what if he just replied, 'I don't believe this map is accurate?' Or what if he just said 'I don't believe my eyes reveal objects independent of th...
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