Category: Hume
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More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?
Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness. I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat. How does the Humean* account for…
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Modus Trollens
The modus operandi of the cyberpunk.
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Hume and Kant on Sense Perception
Another round with Ed Buckner who writes, Meanwhile I continue to struggle through Kant, and I point out what seems to be a fundamental and insuperable difficulty below. (I may be wrong). Start with Hume, and with what he means by ‘impressions’. As I write, I am looking at what I take to be the black surface of…
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The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness
I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel. The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either!…
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The Riddle of the Self
Jacques comments: I like your reply to the reader who asked about the existence of the self. All good points! I wonder what you think about the following different response to people like Harris (or Hume)… It seems to me that they just don't adequately support their claim that no self can be known or…
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An Anselmian Antilogism
Philosophy is its problems, and they are best represented as aporetic polyads. One sort of aporetic polyad is the antilogism. An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are more…
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More on the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self
Peter Lupu e-mails: In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not…
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A Tension in My Thinking: Hume Meets Parmenides
I recently wrote the following (emphasis added): According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what…
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The Sense of Contingency and the Sense of Absurdity
The parallel is fascinating and worth exploring. According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what…
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Second Thoughts: A Philosophy Blog
Readers who have stuck with me over the years will remember commenter 'Spur' whose comments were the best I received at the old Powerblogs site. Safely ensconced in an academic position, he now enters the blogosphere under his real name, Stephen Puryear. His weblog is entitled Second Thoughts. I recently reposted from the old blog Hume's Fork…
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Hume’s Fork and Leibniz’s Fork
No doubt you have heard of Hume's Fork. 'Fork,' presumably from the Latin furca, suggests a bifurcation, a division; in this case of meaningful statements into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the one consisting of relations of ideas, the other of matters of fact. In the Enquiry, Hume writes: Propositions of this…
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What Is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?
One source of its appeal is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. Permit me to explain. (My ruminations are in part inspired by Ernest Gellner, to give credit where credit is due.) Crudely put, as befits a crude…
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Hume on Belief and Existence
Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment…