Free Republic

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it....

David Hume was a Scottish philospoher well known for his attack on the principle of causality - the principle that nothing can occur or exist without a cause. He believed that although one event (set of impressions) always preceded another, this did not prove that the first event caused the second. The constant conjunction of two events, he said, built up the expectation that the second event would take place after the first. But this was nothing more than a strong belief or habit of mind taught by experience. One could never prove that there were causal connections among impressions....

Hume, Father of Postmodernism and Anti-rationalism—Part 2 by Reginald Firehammer Perversion of "Empiricism" Hume's reduction of ideas to nothing more than fuzzy remembered images of actual perceptions is wrongly called empiricism. John Locke is the father of true empiricism, which is nothing more than a denial of innate (or a priori) knowledge and philosophical rationalism (the belief that knowledge can be derived by reason alone without reference to the perceived world) and insistence that all knowledge is derived and based on conscious experience of the world. For Locke, the world we are conscious of is objectively real, and it is...

Hume, Father of Postmodernism and Anti-rationalism—Part 1 by Reginald Firehammer Postmodernism, according to the Public Broadcasting System, is: A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which...

Hume, Father of Postmodernism and Anti-rationalism—Part 3 by Reginald Firehammer Multiculturalism and Ignorance The first of Hume's two destructive concepts referred to in the previous part of this article is found in "Section V, Sceptical Solution of These Doubts, Part I" where he introduces what he calls a "principle" that is his explanation and justification for believing in cause and effect. "This principle is Custom or Habit. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always...

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher well known for his attack on the principle of causality - the principle that nothing can happen or exist without a cause. 1.) He believed that although one event (set of impressions) always preceded another this did not prove that the first event caused the second. The constant conjunction of two events, he said, built up the expectation that the second event would take place after the first. But this was nothing more than a strong belief or habit of mind taught by experience. One could never prove that were causal connections among impressions....

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal in upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received. --David Hume, Of the Liberty of the Press, 1742...Mr. Carter, having staked his "observer" reputation on this ridiculously lopsided game, sealed the fate of the Venezuelans when he rushed to anoint Chávez as the winner and advised Mr. Powell to do the same. This betrayal of a neighboring democracy may one day leave ugly...

...Her book is thus animated by dismay and perplexity over the way the French Enlightenment is seen as the main intellectual event of the 18th century, whereas a parallel and in many respects more successful movement in Britain is routinely relegated to an inferior status. Her heroes, therefore, are not Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau as much as Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke. In a similar spirit, she invokes and concurs with Hannah Arendt's notion that the American revolution, rather than the revolution in France, was the great political watershed of modern times. For Himmelfarb, the contrast between the...