Posts Tagged existentialism

Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?

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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Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract

Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.

Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible!

You can get the reading from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html

End song: “The Villa” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).

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