To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing, to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bull-rush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 1757, Sect XI.
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And fair enough too.
That was supposed to be KiwiInOz not ki! Damned computer thinking for itself. The fires 'll be kindled for them next.
Hume's prose sounds more like a historical prediction than a philosophical, and a clearly falsified one at that. It is in fact scholastic religion that has to retreat as secular analytic philosophy and empirical science have advanced. The general public is still acutely afflicted with superstition and ignorance, but religion has mostly survived the intellectual onslaught of enlightenment thinking by partitioning itself away from the discourse of which it was once the primary voice.
All I know about Hume is that he famously resolved his own (Humean) skepticism about our knowing anything about the future, which was a consequence of applying his own reason (pretty badly, since he ignored the rationality of believing in such laws of Nature as are indicated by empirical evidence), he resolved it by saying that we must (simply because that is our Nature, paradoxically) simply ignore reason. That is, Hume's reason was insufficient to get him a reasonable belief even in (the approximate truth of Newton's laws of) gravity!
I think you would benefit from reading a good introduction to Hume, Enigman. That is nothing like the Hume I studied.
That's not even wrong...
Wasn't it more that he thought that believing that the future would resemble the past, on the grounds that the future had always resembled the past before, was circular reasoning?
I probably know nothing of Hume then, although I've read stuff like this: http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/hume/ and so gather that Hume had no other reasons, to replace the circular one Tlonista mentions, instead pronouncing that we are right to feel that the future will resemble the past (in various ways) precisely because we have (in the past) become habituated to such things (?)
Shorter Hume:
Did I get it right? Was I at least as close as Enigman?
"Did I get it right? Was I at least as close as Enigman?"
I would say on a scale of 1 to 5 billion you at least managed to get into double figures.
Re "Burn all the philosophers", I imagine that Hume was warning philosophers to be wary of mobs of superstitious fools. Another quote from the same book (which could be good advice re the creationism/physicalism debate) is:
"Opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy." (Hume 1757)
Hang on, "calm"? "happily"? Philosophy has changed a bit since Hume's days! So, in good-analytic nit-picky mode, I'll defend my words against "That is nothing like the Hume I studied." Maybe not, but as Hume himself said, in his (1741-2) Of the Parties of Great Britain: "The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions."
Anyway, from his (1739) Treatise: "Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Furthermore, and rather unreasonably, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
And from his (1748) Enquiry: "Custom, then, is the great guide of human life." He had little respect for custom (and a bit of a thing about burnings), saying of any book deficient in mathematics or science, "Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
(I still don't know very much about Hume, but I did just find some other interesting quotations, e.g.:)
"Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong." (Richard Feynman)
You seem to be engaged upon an attempt to dismiss my profession with prejudice. That's your right, but quote mining Hume or anyone else won't substitute for actively learning about the views of those you quote. I won't do a summary of Hume here - he's a sophisticated thinker who still dominates a lot of discussion about philosophy of science over two centuries later, which is no small thing. Feynman may have been right once - philosophy of science was, in the 1970s, only about 40 years old at best. Now it is a very much changed profession, and not so easily dismissed.
I'm sure that there is a good article on Hume at Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia. Go read them...
Re how Hume "still dominates a lot of discussion about philosophy of science over two centuries later" - exactly! It was precisely the modern Humeans (e.g. David Lewis) that I was thinking of, in my first comment (about how Hume did not think that empirical evidence could rationally amount to evidence for underlying, necessitating, laws of nature). In fact, what little I (imagine that I) know of Hume (e.g. his Enquiry, and the Stanford article that I previously cited, contra your implication) I found out about in order to understand such modern developments (rather than to appreciate a Great Man per se). Of course, you would presumably not think that I've understood what I've read thus far, since I disagree with you; but in fact, far from being engaged upon an attempt to dismiss your Profession with prejudice (rather than to refute your Physicalistic beliefs, which I'd try to do, and hopefully without prejudice, since otherwise I would not have refuted them properly), I may just have a broader view of it than you seem to think possible. I would attribute my broad view to my agnosticism about the ends of science; perhaps your underestimation of non-physicalists is a natural consequence of your physicalism?
Philosophy of science began in 1930?!!
Roughly, as a distinct subdiscipline, yes, I think so.
Ah, I see (although I wonder just how distinct, philosophical subdisciplines can be); I'm a great fan of the French Mathematician and Philosopher of Science, Henri Poincare, so I was going to throw in something from his Science and Hypothesis (hell, I will anyway, since it pre-refutes Feynman (#12 above) :)
Science is built up of fact, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. (Poincare 1905)
No, I'm not trying to dismiss your profession with prejudice, but I am increasingly puzzled by how my view of Hume is nothing like the Hume that you studied. That is because I'm presently reading "Truth" by Simon Blackburn, and have happened upon just my view of Hume. My paperback copy is in Penguin's Popular Philosophy series (2006), and on the back cover the Times says of Simon that he is "unequalled as an academic philosopher" (and you might like him, because he is an atheist, objecting in this book to various relativisms). Anyway, in a section on eliminativism, where he is mentioning scepticism, he says (sorry for yet another quote, but the point is that these are his words not mine):
"This is in fact Hume's characteristic position. There is no prospect of us doing any better than thinking, for example, in terms of a spatially extended world of independent objects. Nature forces us so to think, and it would be absurd to recommend otherwise. Yet we may have no reason whatsoever for supposing that the thoughts we then have are true: indeed we may even have good reason to suppose them false. Scepticism thus does not imply eliminativism, although, as the example of Hume shows, the cost of holding one and not the other is a pessimistic view of the place of knowledge and reason in human life." (Blackburn 2006: 115)
Simon continues: "Following Locke and Berkeley, Hume despaired that the whole thing remained a muddle, in which we inconsistently recognize sometimes that our ideas and impressions are fleeting denizens of our own mind, entirely dependent upon us, while at other times we think of them as permanent public objects in a space we share with other people. So while we cannot help adhering to a common-sense view of ourselves as inhabiting such a space (and being confident of quite a lot about what is in it), philosophers can do nothing to underwrite that confidence. On the contrary, the path of wisdom is not even to think about it: faced with this inevitable contradiction in our world view 'carelessness and inattention can alone afford any remedy'." (Blackburn 2006: 141; the quote at the end is from Hume's Treatise)
Simon continues: "Hume was preoccupied not so much with the nature of the world as with our thinking about the world. And when he considered this thinking, he convinced himself that almost nothing about it is explained by reason. Instead there are mechanisms of 'natural belief': the subjective inevitability that a human nature like ours, giving rise to minds like ours, will end up thinking about the world in the ways we do. We will turn our strings of impressions into objects, and convert the patterns in our experience into causal laws, but although this is natural, and useful, it has no other basis in reason. But it is worse than that. Not only does reason not generate our thinking, there is also no standpoint from which reason can reassure us that in thinking as we are bound to do, we get things right. Nature may or may not conform to the ways we think, but there is nothing we can do to reassure ourselves that she is likely to do so. In fact, as already sketched, when it comes to the external world reason actually insists that what we do is inconsistent. (Blackburn 2006: 145-6)