David Hume: Causality, the Problem of Induction, and the Subjectivity of Ethics by Leonard Peikoff

well where are we now what do we have in Humes universe we have a bundle of impressions or experiences images and so on impressions of what nothing external world is a myth experiences experience by home nobody the self is a myth now you might think this is as far as we can go in skepticism impressions of nothing by nobody but there is more to go yet there's one very famous and incredibly influential point of Humes that is almost universally accepted today by philosophers there is still one more link tying the world or time experiences together which must be shattered if we're to end up with a real poached egg mentality and that is the law of cause and effect remember Berkeley had believed in cause and effect coming from God Hobbes had believed in cause and effect every major philosopher prior to you believed in cause and effect Hume now sets his nominalism and sensualism to work to demolish cause and effect - so now we'll look at Humes greatest quote achievement his destruction of the law of cause and effect well again we follow the standard procedure let's take the term cost what does it mean we say a causes B take a classic simple example we take a rock and throw it at a window the window shatters we say the rock cause the window to break what does it mean to say one thing caused another well says you people think that there are three points involved two of them as well CL okay one the vinyl one proves to be meetings well one thing involved in the car relationship is spatial contiguity togetherness in space the rock actually touches the window for instance in the process of it right well that's very simple we can see the two of them in direct physical contact so we have a direct perceptual referee for the phrase spatial contiguity or spatial togetherness and therefore that's perfectly meaningful well that of course is not enough causal relationship also involves temporal contiguity the window breaks immediately after in turn the rock strikes and it gains assume that's a perfectly respectable phrase temporal continuity because we can observe one thing happening immediately after another in time and therefore that is perfectly meaningful now spatial and temporal contiguity after all do not yet give us the essence of the causal relationship a coincidence can have these two characteristics for instance suppose I casually touch this lectern now while I'm in direct contact with it spatially at the next instant it suddenly gives us I don't know thirteen bounds and the whole room and whole building come down well you would say maybe the two events were spatially and temporally connected but that simply as a coincidence there's no causal connection maybe someone in the next room led off a bomb at the same instant what is the crucial factor the vital ingredient in the concept of causal connection well says you it is necessary connection not only spatial and temporal contiguity but necessary connection when we say a causes B we mean more than simply the two go together in space and the two go together in time we mean that the first necessitates the second that the to have a compulsory connection to each other that granted the first the second must happen that the first produce the second that the first makes the second happen etc all those being synonyms for necessary connection well now let us put this strand necessary connection to the test of the theory of meaning do we ever perceive or form an image I have necessary connection between events now watch it very closely I don't have a window here to demonstrate but you just have to prepare a project that I take a rock and I throw it at the window you see the rock sailing slowly across the room then you see now you could stand there you right next to the wall with a magnifying glass to watch you see the rock moving touch the window so far there's no necessity that's just a rock right the next thing you see the fragment shadow right now no little flag came out and said the next event is unavailable there was no booming voice from the sky that's Arabic what comes now has to be there was no Doris Day saying que sera sera we perceived the two events go together in space and time that's all we never come in contact with any such phenomenon as a necessity what is necessity like is it red is it loud is it a heart well can you form an image of it what does it look like what would it taste like obviously we cannot from a perceptive necessity we cannot form an image of necessity it must therefore be an utterly meaningless term the phrase necessary connection must be just noise like gloop and so of course must any of its synonyms a synonym of nonsense is nonsense and therefore when you say one thing produces another or makes it happen or given the first the second must happen all of those are equally meetings now let's have him speak for himself on this quote first he states his nominalism and sensuous quote if he was a proposition which will not admit a much dispute but all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions that's his sensualism you see an idea is simply a faded copy of your expense expense to be failure I'm continuing the quote to be fully acquainted therefore with the idea of necessary connection let us examine its impression in order to find the impression with greater certainty let us search for it in all the sources from which it may possibly be derived now unquote now he conducts the scrupulous search all over the place looking for necessary connection if only he could find it and quote when we look about us towards external objects and consider the operation of causes we are never able in a single instance to discover any power or necessary connection any quality which binds the effect to the cars and renders the one and infallible consequence of the other we only find that the one does actually in fact follow the other there is not in any single particular instance of cause and effect anything which can suggest the idea of necessary connection unquote well if an idea the name for a fading experience copy of an experience and there is no experience of necessary connection there is no idea of necessary connection the phrase must be meaningless when therefore you take a knife and put it in somebody's heart and twist it one event is observing the knife going and the next event is you see the man turned pale and lie down on the ground and those are two events that I spatially and temporally contiguous and that's it you cannot say one made the other happen all you have a right to assert in fact the only thing that is meaningful to assert is that the two events go together in space and time you observe that one is right next to the other that one is right after the other but you can't observe that one is because of the other and of course that's right you can't observe the causality well why do you think that there is a necessary relationship if in fact this is a myth again because you have an overactive imagination in this case you have a hyperactive associative mechanism two events which in fact have no necessary connection or it would be meaningless to say so two events happen by chance to go together so many times in your experience but after a while you form the habit simply by custom by conditioning to expect the second when you encounter the first that is the source of the irrational idea of necessary connection you observes as you repeated conjunctions repeated conjunctions to events which happen to go together repeatedly and you begin to associate the two and expect the second after the first for instance suppose you were brought up by an irrational mother and for no reason at all every morning it when you sat down by breakfast at breakfast to drink a glass of orange juice just as you picked the glass of orange juice up she had a huge strap and she smashed the kitchen table with well on this happened day after day there's no causal connection but that's just the kind of mother you have after a while as you pick up the oranges you flinch any expectation of the strap and you come to associate the two you see simply by a quantity of repetition well Hume says this is exact the relationship in every case where we assert cause of the fact that's not his example causality is simply a subjective expectation on our part completely irrational without any justification you can use the word cause if you want but then all it means is two events are repeatedly conjoined up to now in our experience and we therefore have the accompanying irrational baseless expectation that there's some connection between them but in fact there is no connection I think I have one more quote from humor on this quote the famous conclusion all events seem entirely loose and separate loose in second one event follows another but we never can observed any tie between them they seem conjoined but never connected and as we have no idea of anything which never appeared to our senses the conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connection at all and that this word is absolutely without any meaning when employed either and philosophical reasoning or common life unquote that's uncompromising human statement now I suppose you can test this and say oh that's ridiculous causality is not simply a matter of habit chloral sequences are necessary their opposites are literally inconceivable we couldn't even imagine their opposites happening Hume comes back with a famous example he says you can't you can perfectly well imagine the opposite happening it gives the example of Adam of course he doesn't believe in Adam doesn't believe in anything but it's just as an example of the first man now adam across the garden sees a flame that is adam able to know before he experiences the behavior of the flame that the flame is going consume him if he puts his hand into it no he says Adam hasn't the faintest idea of this orange tongue that's flickering is going to behave when he puts his hand into it prior to experience if we asked Adam is it gonna make you six feet tall or burn your hand off or turn you into a pumpkin Adam what's that I haven't a clue well says you what does he got after experience after experience it's got a burned hand he doesn't have any more understanding of why this took place as far as you can see the fire could just as well have turned him into ice or into a pumpkin and otherwise it simply is a matter brute fact that it happens to be the case that fire up to now burns or warmth but it's unintelligible why this is so and we could easily conceive the opposite now someone were to save it we can explain by reference to scientific law why fire does what it does you would say scientific law scientific laws based on cause and effect cause and effect depends on necessary connection and that's meaningless so much for scientific well how we do as we let our familiarity with certain arbitrary sequences delude us into thinking that the connection is intelligible when actually it's completely unintelligible well suppose you try to give humor proof in logic that every event must have a cause that necessitates well Hume says go ahead and try and I'll show you that you can't give me any such proof is your proof going to rely on reason he says you answer well certainly I'm gonna give a rational proof well says you by reason we can only prove truths whose opposites would be contradictory logical contradictions reason teaches us that we have to believe because the opposite would be a contradiction so we can prove that 2 + 2 is 4 because of somebody denied it we could show him he was contradicting himself now anything which is a contradiction it is inconceivable you can't conceive around square for instance because it's the two sides annihilate each other now is there any difficulty in conceiving that the law of cause and effect is fast what any contradiction be involved he asks in conceiving no the opposite of the law of cause and effect he says is perfectly conceivable it's easy to understand it's not like a round square which obliterates it itself it's perfectly conceivable take the idea there are events which don't have any causes now if this was a contradiction we shouldn't even be able to grasp it this should be like married bachelor but says whom there's no difficulty in grasping this just imagine I'm making up the example but this is his idea imagine you're walking down the street and suddenly an apple pops into existence out of thin air nothing proceeded it's not a hallucination it just is there without any cause wild isn't he could drop now says Hume this is perfectly conceivable there's no contradiction in it if there were a contradiction you couldn't conceive it but you understood my story so you must be able to conceive it whereas if I sit around square popped out uux I don't know what that is if it's conceivable there's no contradiction if there's no contradiction reason can't prove it reason only proves something whose opposite is a contradiction therefore the law of cause and effect cannot be proved since it can't be proved in reason and we know there's no basis for it in reference to experience we concluded the law of cause and effect is bereft of any foundation of any kind reason or an experience it is therefore simply a myth now of course the objections to this human viewpoint are legion since this is the last time I'll get my licks in and you might keep interrupting each point because I can't put it off any more than course having running out but let me just indicate briefly notice that houmous tombs that if he can visualize an event that takes place allegedly without a cause that's the same as saying he conceives it without contradiction now of course if our stall heard this argument he would say you are visualizing an event which implies a contradiction and therefore you are actually conceiving nothing but an irrational figment of your own imagination you have an image but not illogical concept what what Hugh's answer be if he heard that what's the difference an image is a concept if I can form an image of something I've formed a concept of that of course is his nominalism concept is an image so if you can form an image you can form a concept and if you can form a concept and it's obviously logically possible therefore if you can form an image any arbitrary fantastic image the thing it stands for is logically possible that is the end result of reducing concepts to images the way the novel is do now you might think you would satisfy you if you gave him the proof of cause and effect that we developed from Aristotle's philosophy you remember the argument which had essentially two premises actions are actions of entities and entities have identity they are what they are the law of identity and therefore to make a long story short they can only act in accordance with their nature now if you were to reincarnate david hume and give him this argument he wouldn't bat an hour or turn a hair because observe each premise entities he would say what is that all we have are loose floating bundles of qualities and that's all that he has a nominal essentialist can encounter and therefore the premise about entities existing is already out and so is therefore the base of any proof of cause-and-effect given his normalness and as for the law of identity is that supposed to be a necessary general truth well then as an ominous that of course must be linguistic semantics just the way you use words it doesn't say anything now you see in other words causality is already comes fairly far down philosophy you first of all have to have the conceptual level to validate your knowledge of anything including of causality so there's actually nothing new to answer in Humes attack on cause and effect if you can answer his nominalism and sensualism if you can defend a valid theory of concepts then his whole attack on cause and effect crashes to the ground along with the whole rest of his philosophy and of course if you cannot answer his Norman listen in sensualism then you are lost and everything is lost and you see again the crucial importance of a valid theory of concept in any event for Hume the collapse of cause and effect leads to overwhelming insoluble problems it leads him to complete and total skepticism because if there is no cause-and-effect how can we predict the future how can we generalize how can we say that because things have happened a certain way in the past therefore they will happen that way in the future how can we ever formulate scientific laws how can we even have science - all of which Humes answer is you can't we have he says no reason on earth to assume that nature follows law we have no reason to assume that nature is uniform we have no reason to assume that the future will be like the past this is known as the problem of induction and the problem of induction is what makes you think that because something has happened a certain way repeatedly in the past it will therefore happen that way in the future now of course if there are necessary connections in reality if there are actual laws which nature must obey then you can validly generalize from experience under the appropriate circumstances but if you destroy causality and you reduce it nature to simply unintelligible brute conjunction of events without any necessity then anything is possible at the next instant and the fact that something has happened a thousand times proves nothing about the future it's simply been a run of coincidence now people often misunderstand Hume and they think he is saying well you can never be certain about the future you can only have a degree of probability he goes much beyond that he says you can't even have the faintest trace of probability with regard to the future every occurrence is a a new event all events are loose and separate there is no necessity about any conjunction of events and therefore you having the slightest reason he says to assume that the future will resemble the past in any respect if I throw a pity up in the air now up to now the penny has come down and you might be inclined to say well it's a good chance it will come down again but of course in humans philosophy there's only one chance an infinity that it will come down it might still stand still it might go straight up it might turn into Hegel it might become a quarter it could do anything now you say but it's become it's come down so many times in the past well I've heard humans say that just goes to show that we have had such a run of good luck that we shouldn't expect it to continue that's known as the problem of induction well we've reached a total dead end an absolutely shattered universe we have loosely floating qualities no entities no reality no stuff no causality everything a bhoot contingent fact now let's mop up some final points is there any necessary knowledge according to you anything we can know as an as necessary yes he says but not matters of fact not matters of fact anything which talks about the way things actually or any factual statement is contingent we derive it from experience it is empirical a posterior I using the term I introduced last time which means dependent on experience well then where do we get necessary knowledge of only in what Hume calls relations of ideas if I out of the statement bachelors are male I can know that that has to be true because as Hume it is a matter of definition i define bachelor as an entity one of whose characteristics as being male and therefore this is a necessary truth I can count on it but it doesn't tell me anything about facts it would be true even if there are no bachelors it's necessary simply because we make it so by our arbitrary nominal istic definitions if it stated an actual fact of reality he would say how would you ever know it is necessary therefore this kind of truth the so called relations of ideas we arrived at by reason or fad or analysis in their case the opposite would be a contradiction they are learned by definition not by experience they are so called a priority and so we have the standard dichotomy that we have seen in so many different forms as it exists in Hume the linguistic truths versus the existential or factual truth the logical truths versus the factual choose the truths of Reason which are necessary but detached from reality and the truths of experience which pertained the fact that our contingent you see this is a variant of the standard dichotomy and this is what what comm then picked up and called the analytic the truths versus of synthetic the analytic being the ones you arrive at by analysis the logical truth so-called and the synthetic being the ones that tell you actual empirical information now given this which is therefore not original with you what happens to metaphysics if you accept this dichotomy of necessary relations of ideas which are linguistic versus the contingent factual empirical truths well is metaphysics supposed to be factual well the advocates of metaphysics say certainly metaphysics tells you facts about reality well if it's factual it has to be empirical is metaphysics supposed to therefore tell you simply contingent empirical hypotheses no the advocates of metaphysical principles like cause and effect for instance say they are necessary well there's no such possibility as a factual necessary truth if it's necessary it's simply linguistic if it's factual it is not necessary is metaphysics supposed to be linguistic no say it's advocates is metaphysics supposed to be contingent then no say its advocates well then says you metaphysics as such is out into the fire with it there is no room for any such subject if you come and say to Hue but what about existence exists a is a consciousness is the Faculty for perceiving reality every event has a cause he would say to you do you mean those propositions as expression of your arbitrary linguistic usage you would say certainly not I mean those to be facts in reality he would say did you arrive at them by sensory perception and do you regard them as simply contingent truths you say certainly not those are laws of principles of reality say no such category it's either a subjective relation of ideas or it is a brute contingent sensualist type fact therefore as far as metaphysics is concerned throw it into the fire a viewpoint echoed in the 20th century by many schools who are simply neohuman the upshot in Humes few point is this if you are certain about a proposition if you understand why it must be true if it's really reliable it's detached from reality and on the other hand if it has something to say about the real world you can't be certain about it and you can't make any sense if you know it must be true then it's not about the world it says nothing about facts it just expresses linguistic conventions if it says something about facts then it is contingent uncertain unreliable if you prove it by experience it's contingent and unreliable if you prove it by logic it simply isn't an arbitrary convention so you're trapped either away you cannot win you end up in a complete skepticism now let us look briefly at some final topics from you which we can race through briefly because the essence of his philosophy you now know human God well of course God cannot survive on a human philosophy God is supposed to be a spiritual substance who is the cause of the world well every item in that statement is gone there is no world no spiritual substance of no causality and consequently God is out on human takes great delight in demolishing God he's particularly interested in the argument from design you know the readers digest teleological argument and he loves to take on religious people and make mince meat of their viewpoint now there are passages in Hume which indicate that religion is still a sensitive subject in his opinion and that he is loath to come out as a complete atheist but obviously any belief in God would be completely incompatible with his philosophy in essence his view would be that God as a term is radically different from anything a sensualist can come in contact with and therefore it's simply a meaningless noise and therefore Hume is essentially anti religious if you read his detailed arguments I may say you would find them a mixture of acute objections he's a fairly good polemicist but he's always a human and to untangle his good objections from his crazy humanism which are all mashed together it's easier to refute God on your own without help from you now the effects of Humes assault on God were that combined with other influences he was only one but he contributed heavily to the fact that after this period no influential philosopher again attempted to prove the existence of God in reason Conte was very religious but he did not think you could prove God and reason Hegel well Hegel is Hegel and his God is hardly the same as anybody else is gone Nietzsche said correctly in the 19th century god is dead meaning religion was a dead issue and in the 20th century one whole school derivative from Hume and Khan says that God is simply a moyes like gloop it stands for nothing time and another school says that if you do believe in God you have to go by absurd feelings because God is not graspable by reason so God never survived the 18th century philosophically he never again had the importance that he did in Descartes Spinoza liveness Locke Berkeley now there are people who think that this is good and that Hume has done a great service combined with a few other philosophers and getting rid of God I would not agree with that because as an Objectivist I would say the concept of God is bad because it is anti Reason an anti reality but in Hume God has thrown out along with reason and reality on the same grounds and this is a very very bad mixture no remember once talking to a brash sophomore this was or 20 years ago and I asked him if he believed in God and he said of course not God doesn't exist nothing does now that is the human mentality and it helps to explain to you why it is a mistake to call objectivism atheism Objectivists are atheists we deny the existence of God but all sorts of people deny the existence of God including human the communists for different reasons and therefore to know that somebody is an atheist is to tell you nothing about the essence of his philosophy it simply tells you that there is one aberration he did not commit but that leaves up in a terrific field now on ethics to say a word about humor you on that question it should be obvious that his ethics is compatible with the rest of his philosophy in other words it is a thoroughly skeptical subjectivist ethics the question he raises is how can you ever defend an ethical or evaluative proposition if we have to base everything on experience experience only tells us what is the case how do we ever get a knowledge of what ought to be the case did you ever touch a desirability did you ever smell a goodness obviously valued terms you cannot grasp or imbibe through the senses or images and if that is our only means of cognition there is obviously no way to validate value premises so here we have the old problem of deriving values from facts and of course Jim declares it can't be done in fact there's a parallel here just as he claims you can't get a must out of an is you can't get a necessary connection out of a fact so he says you can't get an evaluation out of it is you can't get an art out of it is you can't get a value out of a fact and therefore value judgments are gratuitously arbitrary in their foundation no rational ethics is possible ethics must begin with subjective desires and feelings and when we say something is right or some equivalent value term we ultimately must mean that is what we desire ethics is a matter of feeling reason therefore says Hume is and must be a slave of the passions in other words we have again essentially the surface viewpoint in ethics now there is nothing new therefore in his ethics it's the same skepticism as in the rest of his philosophy and the answer to his specific charge that you cannot get values out of fact is contained well it's contained in Gault speech and it's also in the Objectivist ethics the essay by miss Rand so I won't comment on that further to summarize Humes philosophy I think the best thing is to let him summarize this is a quote from him in which he expresses his arch skepticism well I read you these because they're famous and explicit and because he's British they're intelligible quo tis not solely in poetry and music we must follow our tastes and sentiment but likewise in philosophy when I am convinced of any principle it is only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me when I give depressants to one set of arguments above another I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence objects have no discoverable connection together nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another on quote in other words nobody can know anything this is arch complete skepticism absolute bankruptcy philosophy idea science theory is all a matter of taste and feeling now you say you can't live by this philosophy and you think that that is an objection to Hume well you may or may not be surprised to know that Hume agrees with you he says quite explicitly nor you cannot live by this philosophy he says and the famous passages I won't take the time to read but what it amounts to is that he writes this material showing that external world is meaningless and selfish meaningless and causality is meaningless and so on then he says he leaves this writing and he goes and dines with friends he plays a game of backgammon he uses that example any ladies in the normal world with everybody else and then he says he comes back and reads what he wrote and it seems to him so strained and ridiculous he wants to throw it all body can't find anything wrong with it what is his solution to this dilemma the solution he says is skepticism is a disease that comes from living by reason and the only way out is simply pay no attention to the conclusions of reason quo this sceptical doubt both with respect to reason in the senses is a malady which can never be radically cured that must return upon us every moment however we may chase it away carelessness and inattention carelessness of inattention alone can afford us any remedy for this reason I rely entirely upon them and take it for granted whatever may be the readers opinion at this present moment that an hour hence II will be persuaded that there is both an external and internal world you get the idea in other words cannot live by philosophy you have to be careless and inattentive to it because you can't live by a reason and you do not have to because we are not only rational creatures we are also natural creatures which means we have instincts we have imaginations we have feelings and our feelings and imaginations and instincts will invent the fictions we need and will take us through life prosperously as long as we pay no attention to reason and philosophy if you think you've got a reason for believing what you do you have your actual the actual I can't even say cause because there are no causes but the actual something-or-other of your beliefs is simply instant quote famous line of human if we believe that fire warms or water refresh tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise unquote it's just a pragmatic matter of instinct in other words in the last analysis irrational unfill Asafa chol unthinking blind instinct is superior to reason thought and philosophy that's the final upshot of humans philosophy reason is impotent nobody can know anything reason can't give you a knowledge of reality external reality is a myth entities are a myth the self is a myth cause-and-effect is a myth logic is a subjective construction nobody has any reason to believe anything you can live only if you ignore a reason and function by irrational instinct only if you throw a reason and philosophy into the fire and follow your irrational passions now you see this is the end result of trying to philosophize having invalidated the conceptual faculty and one of two things had to happen at this point either a champion of reason in a valid sense had to appear somebody who finally validated man's conceptual faculty the arch destroyer of all time what appear and put the final seal on man's philosophic demise and the second of course is what happened the man who came on the scene right after Hume who set himself the task of answering Hume who said he was going to avoid the floating constructs of the rationalist and the skepticism of the empiricists that man was caught and of course in the process of giving his answers to these schools he once and for all removed reason from the philosophic scene altogether we have now traced the story from Greece beginning with fail ease and his friends eagerly trying for the first time to probe into the nature of reality and we have gone now all the way through David Hume where the attempt finally collapses with sickening whimper for tonight that's it thank you very much [Applause] how could you ask can we conceive the opposite of the law of cause and effect since it is a conception and it would be meaningless to begin with no the answer is by concept he would mean form an image of can you form an image of the opposite of cause and effect and he and his followers would say yes you could you can form an image of an event without a cause namely the for instance the Apple I mentioned during the lecture and as long as you could image it for them that's forming a concept of how would you deal with a hundred percent predictability for instance a certain mass of rock through with a certain force will always break a window made a certain way Hume would say you have no way what ever of knowing this all you know is that up to now that kind of rock has behaved this way but you haven't got a young reason in a million to believe that it's going to behave that way in the future so he would simply say I don't account for a hundred percent predictability there is no even one percent predictability of course he's wrong but that's what he would say by Humes premises how can our past experiences cause us to form a habit and hence arrive at our idea of cause a good question no answer to it Hume throughout gives causal explanations alleged causal explanations of our fast beliefs our belief in entities in the self in the external world and Sara having denied causality he has no business giving such explanations a point which is commonly made in polemics against him and therefore he has to say that our belief in causality if he's consistent why causality itself is like any phenomenon of the world an intelligible contingent fact which he can't make a header Taylor and in falling into the tendency to give a causal explanation of our mistaken belief in causality using causality while denying it and thereby contradicting his own philosophy if you asked cume to put his hand hurt his hand yes in a fire a few times and see if this would be the time his hand wouldn't be burned what'd he do assuming not what would be his reason undoubtedly he wouldn't do it and he would say because he's a creature of instinct then creature instinct is conditioned to expect irrationally that the flame would burn him and he prefers to live by his irrational instinct if you manage to fire back on the concept of natural creatures with instincts and motions and so on doesn t necessarily refute his original empiricist premise of no innate ideas if so didn't you see this and offer any explanation well you must understand that for Hume instincts emotions etc are part of the impressions we are directly given just as we are directly given the simple ideas those include certain emotions passions and feelings which for Hume do not derive from our ideas or from our intellect attire they are simply irreducible primaries they are part of our given empirical equipment and therefore he feels no compulsion about to offer any explanation of emotions emotions are simply there whatever emotions we have we have and that's it there are elements like sensations with no further explanation offered of course since he offers no explanation of anything it shouldn't surprise you that he offers no explanation of emotions either why did certain philosophers develop a preference for certain psychological processes namely sensation and perceptions which they are to be valid or meaningful and reject as meaningless or non-existent other psychological processes such as conceptualization and understanding whose existence are equally identifiable introspectively well I tried to explain that in the process of giving the course they believed that concepts were not based on reality and therefore they simply Rican stood what is in fact available introspectively if it'll make you feel better to think of that noise coming from the next room as simply a secondary quality and therefore is not really real in other words concepts do pose a certain problem that percepts don't I'm not saying that the conclusions of philosophers are valid but concepts are not directly perceivable in reality the way percents are percepts represent a direct contact with reality concepts an indirect contact and therefore if a philosopher says yes I can grasp perception but I don't know what con section is it represents to be sure profound defaults on his philosophic tasks since the essence of philosophy is the theory of concepts but on the face of it it is more intelligible and if you were to say I grasp concepts but I deny per sense because percents are much simpler and easier to grasp and in this sense I would offer that as a partial explanation but the full story is of course the whole nominalist argumentation

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Keywords: history of philosophy, history, philosophy, history of western philosophy, western philosophy, leonard peikoff, ayn rand, ayn rand institute, objectivism, objectivist, political theory, modern philosophy, ancient philosophy, school of life, crash course, lecture, educational video, secular humanism, david hume, hume, causality, induction, Problem of Induction, Ethics, subjectivity of ethics, hume's ethics, hume's ethical theory, objectivity of moral judgments

Id: SKzpLlhEkDI

Length: 50min 38sec (3038 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020