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Discussion => Philosophy, Economics and Justice => Topic started by: Fr33Sombrer0 on December 17, 2012, 01:57 am

Title: hume.
Post by: Fr33Sombrer0 on December 17, 2012, 01:57 am
cause, i mean, jesus christ, it's just fucking beautiful isn't it?

honestly, the more hume i read, the less i think i really have something to contribute to the world of philosophy. but not in a bad way. it's like the way you feel (or ought to) about stevie ray vaughan if you play guitar


if you haven't read the treatise on human nature, i highly, highly recommend that you do. some of it is just strikingly beautiful.
Title: Re: hume.
Post by: Secretive on December 17, 2012, 06:26 am
I'm ummm kind of confused by this thread. Explanation? lol

Secretive
Title: Re: hume.
Post by: nuyt on December 17, 2012, 06:54 am
He's talking about David Hume, one of the seminal figures in the British offshoot of Western philosophy. Fr33 seems to be mainly focusing on the quality of his writing (for good reason, we was an amazing writer). But beyond even that, he developed one of the most significant theories ever to come out the Western philosophical tradition. It turned out to be hugely influential in getting the Scientific Revolution off the ground, and whether people realize it or not (most don't unless you've studied the role philosophy has played in the history of the West), the world view most of us take for granted is hugely influenced by, and indebted to, his work. Just about any university course on Epistemology or the philosophy of science will have you grappling with the Humean Paradox.

Boiled down, he proved (in a way that nobody to this day has been able to refute of find holes in) that past experience has no predictive power over future events. One analogy that's often used to illustrate this idea is that just because you have experience of the sun rising every morning you've been alive, that is no guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. While this may initially seem trivial ("is that just saying you can't predict the future? everyone knows that..."), it was actually very controversial several hundred years ago when he proposed the idea, and it has far reaching consequences for the validity of scientific experiments. No matter how many times you perform the same experiment and gotten the same result, he proved that it is impossible to infer with 100% certainty that the next time you perform the same experiment you will get the same result.

Personally I think that to really appreciate the significance of this, you have to yourself be a scientist working every day with experiments (and since that is not me, I just have a humble interest, and some training, in the philosophy of science, I feel like I can only appreciate all this from a distance), but the best way I can describe Hume's continuing significance is to say that, every scientist working on some kind of experiment anytime over the last 10-150 years had Hume's work in their head, as the foil, or better put the limiting factor determining how certain they could be of their findings. Hume is why any real, professional scientist remains humble about just how much they can discover, about how certain they can be in their work. He, more than almost any other figure, seeded the Western mind with it's skeptical quality.

So anybody who appreciates in their own life the importance of being skeptical, owes a great deal of dept to Hume. Whether they've read him, or even heard of him before. :)