(It's Edmund Burke)
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Hank
Why not go back to Bishop Berkley?
Firehammer? I want a cool last name like that.
There’s only one problem; rationalism underpins atheism, and therefor enables socialism, communism, and things like death camps and medical experiments on humans like the Nazis.
The only savings of the human race is the Judeo-Christian ethic.
ping
Thought you might like this.
Great post. thanks
Great post. thanks
bump for later read
For Hume, “ideas” are like fuzzy pictures or representations of what we directly experience. The idea “dog” or “table” is just an incomplete “picture” of a dog or table recalled from memory.
(It's Edmund Burke)
later read
Another untempered selective hit piece on Hume without any sense of perspective. Hume’s salient characteristic is no more “little confused fuzzy pictures” than America’s is slavery. Hume’s major effect, as evidenced by college philosophy curricula throughout the West for decades, is to further pull metaphysics out of Dark Age mysticism and into the realm of rational analysis. Someone needs to tell this author that Ayn Rand wasn’t born until after Hume died.
This author has a personality trait of Rand that is shared by many of the more suggestible Oists. With them it is never “X was wrong about Y because...”, but rather, “The monstrous X was deceitful or ignorant of the absurd Y which is the origin of all evil in the world...” It leaves one wondering if “Histrionicists” isn’t a better term for them.
This piece does at least give a reasonably concise summary of how Rand’s metaphysics differs from Hume’s, though I might have worded some things differently.
Sounds familiar. Teach the controversy.
Put me on the philosophy list please. Thanks.
Hume also influenced Kant to give up his Rationalist ways, or as Kant said, to wake up from his dogmatic sleep. Kant perhaps was the greater influence on what eventually leads up to postmodernist thought.
I knew Brit was an older gentleman, but wow....(chuckle)
He’s really holding up well.
It seems clear to me that Hume was what we now call a liberal. Perhaps he was the father of liberalism.
Hume's "philosophy" is literally the very opposite of learning. How ironic that it finds its most enthusiastic adherents within the walls of institutions of "higher learning".
fyi
The rest of the piece consists of similar half-baked cheap shots. Firehammer's the kind of guy who doesn't realize that he lacks the intellectual candlepower to tackle the thought of men much greater than himself. It's also fascinating that he cites adamant, vigilant, remorseless, dyed-in-the-wool atheist Ayn Rand in an attack on atheist Hume. Rand's excessive, indeed extremist, inhuman and ultimately self-defeating, rationalism may have made her adverse to Hume, but that's Rand's problem, not Hume's.
Hume did undermine the foundations of metaphysics and epistemology. Neither Firehammer, armed with all the tools of argumentation, however feebly employed, that've been developed since Hume's day, nor anybody else has been able to restore the status quo ante. Kierkegaard came closest with the "leap of faith," but even that seems more and more naive to the ear of today's "serious" thinkers.
Plato is in pell-mell retreat, friends, and with him much of Christian philosophy. The Truth will continue to be served, but unsupported assertions presented as Truth - the backbone of religious dogma - have never been in deeper disrepute.