Posts Tagged David Hume
David Hume and Adam Smith in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy, Part 2
Posted by Getty Lustila in PEL's Notes on November 15, 2011
The University of Edinburgh from World University
As mentioned in my previous entry, moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues: “the selfish hypothesis,” the nature of moral judgment, and the character of moral virtue. This entry regards the second component: the debate between the rationalists and sentimentalists over the nature and justification of moral judgment.
Moral rationalism—exemplified most clearly in modern philosophy with the work of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and John Balguy—affirms two theses: first, that morality exists; and second, that all particular truths about morality are ascertained through a priori reasoning. Moral judgments are then, properly speaking, judgments performed by an agent’s “faculty of reason.” What is it that the agent is reasoning about? She is reasoning about conceptual relations; or, in Hume’s terms, the “relations of ideas.” (An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
Amartya Sen on Hume on Ethics
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on November 12, 2011
This video records Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s somewhat rambling lecture, wherein he discusses a few themes in Hume’s ethical work which he deems relevant today. Specifically, Sen wants to advocate for Hume’s argument that society’s globalization tends to expand its moral sensitivities. We hear that Hume was among the first to argue that a society’s mores were a function of its culture rather than physical circumstances. Hume was also an early critic of then-nascent British imperialism, arguing that it demeaned the conquerers as much as the conquered.
Many of the Humean insights to which Sen refers seem so obviously true today as to be unworthy of further discussion. But perhaps that says as much of Hume’s foresight and intellectual victory as the tepid nature of Sen’s summary. To be honest, I couldn’t tease out any great insights from the lecture, but I’ll let Sen’s intellectual cred justify the post, and anyway it may prove interesting to those trying to assess Hume’s contributions, if not his continued relevance.
-Daniel Horne
David Hume and Adam Smith in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy, Part 1
Posted by Getty Lustila in PEL's Notes on November 6, 2011
Moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues. First, was “the selfish hypothesis,” which maintained that all declarations of public interest were ultimately expressions of private interest. Second, was the explanation and justification of moral judgment. And third, was the character of moral virtue.
The selfish hypothesis, though largely a minority view, was defended equally by proponents of Mechanism (Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville) and Jansenism (Pierre Nicole). The mechanists considered man to be a machine, one whose parts functioned “every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follows from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.” (Descartes, Treatise of Man
Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 29, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:33 — 96.7MB)
Discussing parts of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge those judgments. Mark, Wes, Seth, and guest Getty Lustila, a phil grad student at Georgia State University, hash through the Scottish stoicism to lay out the differences between these two gents and whether their views constitute an actual moral theory or just a descriptive enterprise.
Read along: We read the sections from the Treatise and from Smith in D.D. Raphael’s collectionBritish Moralists (Vol. 2).
End song: “Honest Judge” by New People from the 2010 album “Impossible Things,” written and sung by Nate Pinney.
The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you’ll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode’s song: After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow “Return to the Partially Examined Life” box there, and you’ll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn’t happen, please email me.
Hume on Miracles Revisited
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on September 21, 2011
Chapter 1 of the Mackie book covers Hume’s account of miracles, which we discussed in our Hume epistemology episode. One of our blog commenters here mentioned offhand that he thought that argument had been long discredited, which was a surprise to me.
You can review the argument at Wikipedia here. Basically it boils down to “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” We have plenty of experience of people lying, but (and this is an appeal to your own experience) no experience of the laws of nature being evidently contravened for special happenstances. Though miracles may in fact occur, we’re never epistemically justified in believing them. Though Hume nominally leaves room for revelation being a route to bypass normal epistemic procedures, Mackie for one just thinks Hume was doing lip service to this principle to minimize his political trouble.
Mackie thinks that arguing for miracles is especially tricky because you have to both argue that there are laws of nature, and that these can be contravened divinely. It’s not enough that there might be some experienced regularities, but that we’re ignorant of the mechanism behind these and so could run into apparent exceptions to the rules we’ve established. It’s that, yes, these are laws working deterministically within a closed system, yet God can set them aside at will. From p. 26:
Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on July 18, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:57 — 96.1MB)
We spoke with Patricia Churchland after reading her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. We also discussed David Hume’s ethics as foundational to her work, reading his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, Parts I and II.
What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? What bearing do facts have on values? Churchland thinks that while Hume is (famously) correct in saying that you can’t deduce “ought” from “is,” the fact that we have moral sentiments is certainly relevant to figuring out what our ethical positions should be, and it’s her main goal to figure out what the mechanisms behind those moral sentiments are: What brain parts and processes are involved? How and when did these evolve? How did cultural factors come into play, building on top of our biological capacity to care for others?
Pat spoke with Mark and Dylan Casey here about topics ranging from the war on drugs to the rationale of punishment to Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. Read some more initial thoughts (and some substantial discussion in readers’ comments) here.
To read along with us, buy Pat’s book.
End song: “Bring You Down” from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by The MayTricks.
Topic for #41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on June 27, 2011
With special Guest Pat Churchland herself!
What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We were contacted by Pat Churchland’s publisher and invited to speak with her about her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.
She was good enough to chat with us (Mark and Dylan) for a full, regular length show yesterday, and not only about her own book, but also about one of her major influences, David Hume, who pioneered a “naturalistic” approach to ethics: we look not for normative laws to provide commands for our behavior, but at the moral sense we already have, and how this plays as a practical matter into the challenges we face in making laws, deciding on punishments, and just getting along in a society.
Churchland’s addition to this project is reporting on and synthesizing the broad swath of current scientific findings on what exactly this moral sense is: how is it realized in the brain and our endocrine system? What mental operations make moral assessments and rule-following possible? Much of her book is taken up with reporting on animal physiology and behavior, so we can see where on the evolutionary path we picked up the abilities to expand the circle of self-regard to include kin and associates, to represent others’ intentions and beliefs to predict their behavior, and to understand and follow social norms.
Happy Birthday David Hume!
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on May 5, 2011
David Hume from the Philosophy Archive
This month lots of people are celebrating David Hume‘s 300th birthday, including our friends at The Philosopher’s Zone and Philosophy Bites. Both have dedicated a series of podcasts to this most important thinker in our tradition and if you aren’t a Humeophile or don’t know that much about him, I’d definitely recommend checking out their special episodes. Did you know that Hume:
- Finished A Treatise of Human Nature when he was only 26? And was supported by his siblings while he wrote it?
- Might have modeled this magnum opus on Hobbes’ work of the same name?
- Was the talk of European intellectual circles for this work but was disappointed at its reception?
- Struggled with his weight?
- Ultimately gave up philosophy to write history? And that his History of England was immensely popular and made him rich?
- Tried to help Rousseau and was treated dreadfully by that prick?
- Never explicitly confessed either atheism or belief in religion claiming no proof existed for either side?
We most all are familiar with his argument against the ability to experience causation and his explication of inductive reasoning, but like many great figures in the tradition, was also a character, admired and reviled and a polymath. Do yourself a favor and pay homage this month to Davie by checking out his works, listening the podcasts referenced above, visiting the Hume Society’s page or watching this clever little video.
Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 14, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:31 — 115.0MB)
Reading Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which is sort of a post-publication Cliff’s Notes to his Critique of Pure Reason.
Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience?
Kant says that yes, we can, to a limited extent, but that everyone before him did it wrong, because they didn’t understand how our minds interact with the world to create experience. He insists that once you read his book, you’ll never be satisfied with such “twaddle” again!
LEARN about the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason! THINK about whether geometric truths are justified by our intuition of space (maybe) and arithmetic is grounded in our intuition of time (probably not). DOUBT whether we actually impose causality on our experience as Kant says! MARVEL at our guest participant, Azzurra Crispino, as she augments the number of speakers on this episode to a PERFECTLY SQUARE number! GAWK as your world is turned up-flicking-side down by Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” (a term we neither use nor explain in this episode)!
Read the book online or buy it.
End song: “Subjectivity” from the 1994 album “Happy Songs Will Bring You Down” by The MayTricks.
Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 29, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:25 — 114.9MB)
Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.
We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth’s experience of Towlie, and more.
Read with us: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662.
End song: “Twitch” by by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.
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