David Hume's Philosophy - Bryan Magee & John Passmore (1987)

the philosopher most widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language is David Hume not an Englishman but a Scot born in Edinburgh in the year 1711. he did some of his best work very young at about 18 he experienced a sort of intellectual Revelation and over the next eight years he produced a large and revolutionary book called A Treatise of human nature it met with little attention and even less understanding in his own phrase it fell deadborn from the Press so in his 30s he tried to rewrite that book in what he hoped would be a more popular form this resulted in two smaller volumes one called an inquiry concerning human understanding and one called an inquiry concerning the principles of morals but these were scarcely any better received and he gave the impression then of turning away from philosophy in his 40s he wrote a history of Great Britain which for a hundred years was the standard work that's why he still sometimes categorized in libraries and books of reference as David Hume historian in his own lifetime he made his reputation too as an economist and his monetary theories have been reattracting attention recently he was even in a modest way a man of Affairs in the war of the Austrian succession he served as a staff officer on two military Expeditions and for a couple of years in his early 50s he was secretary to the British Embassy in Paris and then after that under Secretary of State in London in all the many different circles in which he moved he was popular for his good nature as much as for his genius such was his gift for friendship that he almost brought off the impossible task of befriending his French contemporary philosopher Russo who at one time actually proposed making his home in Britain because Hume was there in France Hume was known as Le Bon David and in his native Edinburgh the street in which he lived was and is named after him sent David Street in view of the latter point it's perhaps ironical that in secret he'd been writing his final philosophical Masterpiece a profound and damaging critique of natural religion which didn't come to light until after his death he died in 1776 and in 1779 his dialogues concerning natural religion were published some people consider it his best work he's an unusually attractive figure who should also be seen as part of that great flowering of intellectual life in Edinburgh in the 18th century which we now refer to as the Scottish Enlightenment in David Hume Adam Smith and James Boswell the Scottish Enlightenment produced the English language's foremost philosopher Economist and biographer and they all knew each other Adam Smith was one of hume's closest friends and was greatly influenced by him Boswell contemplated writing hume's biography though alas he never did there's no substantial literature on Hume and one of the best books in it hume's intentions was written by the person who is with me now to discuss his work professor John Passmore of the Australian National University in Canberra but as a Passmore whenever Hume uh gave a shorter exposition of his own philosophy which he in fact two or three times did he always put fundamental emphasis on what he had to say about causality that is to say what it is for one State of Affairs to bring about or cause another state of affairs the idea being that causality this cause and effect relationship is what binds together the whole of our Known World and he thought that what he had to say about that was the Cornerstone of his philosophy and in fact it would be true to say that it's what he's best known for today can you tell us what the nub of his argument on that was I think I'll try to by means of a practical exam people suppose a small child whose parents have always given it soft cotton toys which has had soft cotton dolls soft cotton dogs so on and so on everything's soft cotton one day somebody gives it a rubber ball the child drops the rubber ball over the side of the bed and the next thing he notices is the rubber ball bounces nothing else in his experience has ever bounced before and here's this ball that begins bouncing now the first thing that David Jim says is that it didn't matter how long the child had looked at that ball turning it over looking at one side and another it could never have inferred that when it dropped the ball the ball would bounce this came to it as something it couldn't expect at prior to experience now take an adult who's watching what happens at this point the adult will say well what has happened is the child has caused the ball to Bounce by dropping it it would say the ball has a power which makes it possible for it to bounce I'd say there's a necessary connection between dropping this rubber ball and it's bouncing that is how the adult would talk now Hume comes along he says well what does the adult got which the child doesn't have after all all that has really happened is that on a number of occasions the adult has seen a ball drop and seen it bounce in fact it has found this always happens as what he calls a constant conjunction so you have two things you first of all have somebody dropping a ball or doing something of that kind and then you'll have bouncing but suppose you'd seen this a hundred times instead of like the child only once what difference can this make after all it hasn't now seen something it hadn't seen before it hasn't seen a mysterious power in the ball it hasn't discovered a mysterious entity called a necessary connection and some sort of peculiar property all it is saying is various people dropping balls and the balls bouncing and yet in fact the adult does believe that there's a necessary connection between the dropping of the ball and it's bouncing or where's this idea come from because for him all ideas have to come from somewhere and he says it comes from nothing except the constant experience of this constant conjunction this works upon the mind as he says it forms the Habit in US of expecting a ball to bounce when we drop it but nothing more is involved than that I could put what you've just said to us in so to speak abstract general terms I think by expressing it this way that we can't form any conception at all of an ordered world without the idea of causal connection between things but cause we discover when we try is something that we can't actually observe we may say that event a causes event B but we find when we examine the situation that all we actually observe is event a followed by event B and there isn't some third entity in the situation A causal link between them that we observe and it won't do to say that ah well yes but we know that event a is the cause of event B Because B always and invariably follows a because the fact is for example that day always and invariably follows night and night always and it variably follows day but neither is the cause of the other so we have this indispensable notion of cause which is at the very heart of our conception of the world and of our understanding of our own experience and yet this notion is not validated by experience or observation and it can't be validated by Logic either and by making us aware of that uh Hume it seems to me has put his finger on a problem to which there's still no generally agreed solution would you agree to that yes there is people of course try various things most of which whom discusses in the traitors and gets rid of some will say oh well nature is uniform so the ball bounces once we'll go on bouncing but that's only to say that the same cause produces the same effect always and that's exactly the thing which has to be demonstrated she's begging the question he's begging the question by saying that and this is true if he says oh well at least it's now more probable that the ball will bounce than not but all probabilities him says are really based on our experience of connections so that this again is No real way out of the of the problem he used the same form of argument with another very fundamental question didn't that is the question of the self and the continuity of the self he said that although we take it for granted that we have selves and that we are continuous selves we discover that we can't actually locate this self in observation or experience that when we look inside ourselves what we actually see is individual thoughts feelings memories emotions and so on but we don't observe some other entity a self that has them now this is a very disconcerting and startling Doctrine isn't it what were its implications well I think one should add that Hume was never really quite satisfied with this as you said he kept on going back when he's giving an account of his theory to the doctor of causality because there he felt satisfied he'd done what he set out to do he'd shown that there is something about our character as human beings which compels us to believe that things are necessarily connected with one another even although we don't observe in the world that necessary connection but it gets terribly difficult when it comes to personal identity he'd said earlier that in respect to ordinary identity what happens is something like this actually every time we close our eyes something the thing in front of us disappears it's no longer there as a perception but when we open our eyes again this is very rough and crude what we see is so similar to what we saw before we close our eyes that we're confused we treat this as having been an experience or identity because we because it's so like keeping our eyes open all the time and just having a single perception now that's all right perhaps in respect to the identity of other people you might say it's the same sort of thing we see them today and we see them tomorrow they're very like one another the actions that they perform on one occasion have certain cause or connections with the ones they they uh have on other occasions but let's take ourselves now we can't say that we become confused between this succession of perceptions and a strict identity because this assumes that there's some we there all the time to become confused and that's why Hume says I think this is why Hume says in the long run that he's very dissatisfied with this and this really worried him because he'd begun from the assumption that so long as one talked only about the human mind and human perceptions one wouldn't get into any great intellectual problems or any intellectual confusions which couldn't be easily cleared away one thing that what he had to say about cause and what he has to say about the self have in common is that in both cases he says let's look for the actual observation the actual experience on which this every day idea is based and in each case when we look for them we discover through our amazement that they're not there it's as if he's trying to base his philosophy on fact now is that what he was referring to in the famous subtitle to his Masterpiece the treaties I've actually written it down here he describes his treaties as an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects was he trying to make philosophy scientific was that his idea well moral subjects of course he intended very broadly he would have included under that everything we now call politics he would have included anything we would call psychology and as well as anything we would call moral philosophy and he did want to make these more scientific in a certain sense than they had ever been what he says is that when you approach these subjects you find that people who usually talk seriously and take evidence into account start making wild statements without any real evidence they start preaching at us rather than telling us what things are like they lay down laws for us rather than looking at the facts and that we ought to look at the facts in respect to political life and human Affairs just as we do in the Natural Sciences there's an implied theory of language and meaning isn't there in in this approach that we are now talking about because he very definitely thought that in order to for a word to mean anything at all it had to relate to a specific idea and for an idea to have real content it had to be derived from experience so in effect Hume is saying if you want to know what a word means look for the experience from which it's derived if you can't find an experience or an observation from which it derives then it doesn't mean anything that that so there's this whole theory of meaning is they're not underlying the philosophical approach that you've just been outlining yes he draws distinction and he's very keen on this although he doesn't mention it specifically very often between talking and thinking we're thinking only when we're operating with clear ideas which have a real Source in experience but He suggests that much of the time we're talking away and we're using what a really completely confused Nations which have no real foundation and experience if he looked at our contemporary political life and our contemporary talk he'd find I think that it was full of Nations which people use completely unreflectively and if you ask what the foundation and experience was of let's say ideas like social justice or ideas like accountability you might find it extremely difficult to see what the actual factual situation was that these were referring they're concretely what they concretely mean and one of his main points is we should look and see what things concretely mean you'd be absolutely horrified by much of what now passes for literary criticism for example that was something he was very interested in but he thought he had to relate it very concretely to literature and now it becomes so much of a rather bad philosophy full of Expressions which humor I think would very rapidly show have no meaning on his theory of meaning it led him to develop something that came subsequently to be known as hume's Fork he said of Any Given body of ideas that when you're approaching it for the first time you must ask yourself two main questions do these ideas concern matters of fact in which case do they rest on observation and experience or do they concern the relations between ideas as in mathematics and logic if the answer to both those main questions is no then he says commit those writings to the Flames because they can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion he was a great as you've just said clearer in a way of intellectual rubbish uh not only in philosophy and politics but in religion and all sorts of other fields do you think that in the history of philosophy that's one of his most important uh function so to speak that he was a clear little way of Illusions I'm pretty sure about that the other thing was that there's one particular illusion he's constantly clearing away and that is that we can prove a great many things which we daily believe he's constantly showing that really we cannot demonstrate even such factors that things exist externally to us or that they continue to exist when we're not looking at them or again that some things are necessarily connected with other things and this means that he often sounds extremely skeptical and indeed he sometimes does Express himself in a very skeptical way but he thinks that it's impossible for any human being to be an all on all outseptic inevitably you you have to believe you have to act like any other human being and a certain measure of skepticism what he calls mitigated skepticism is very useful because it prevents you from falling into the Trap of large ideologies large ideas of every sort which have no real foundation and experience you will say to yourself well look I'm not really totally able to demonstrate the sun will rise tomorrow perhaps it won't and why should anybody that's in that position think that they can say something about the total existence of the world or some very elaborate concept of this kind wouldn't it be true to say that his skepticism was not actually about the world but about the capacities of human reason I mean I don't doubt for one moment but Hume just genuinely did believe that there is an independently existing world of material objects in space and time that causally interrelate to each other and that we have representations of these through our senses and that these representations are internal to us but give us an act an accurate picture of the world around us all that the whole Common Sense view of the world I'm sure Hume believed but it seems to me that what he was contending was that none of this could be proved you couldn't actually show you couldn't prove that any of this was so and you had to just kind of take it for granted in ordinary living but I don't think he doubted it did he I don't think so after all it's essential to what he's saying about the possibility of constructing a theory of human nature and he's able to say two things that this that this will rest on one is our awareness of ourselves and the other is our awareness of other human beings our experience of other human beings well this does imply that human beings exist independently of us that we're not the only being on Earth just living in a world of his own perceptions there are other human beings they behave in various ways their behavior has particular effects and so on none of this does he doubt I think in the most serious sense of doubting indeed it have to be a Madman to do so but he's showing that reason can't prove it but he's showing that what we can prove is very much less than people believe even in the most fundamental Affairs of life so that strict proof plays a very small part in human life outside special areas like mathematics and he didn't even think that was all that important in human Affairs well he really felt that the important things were well he says politics morals literary criticism and what he calls logic which is his word he uses rather broadly to mean the theory of the human understanding anything else the sort of thing that physicists talk about let's say was no doubt important but at the second order the together a clear understanding of human beings and of the human understanding was indeed a necessary preliminary even to a soundly based physical science that learned with soundly based human science and I think he was a person to whom What mattered essentially were human beings now lots of philosophers haven't been like this they've rather got rid of human beings they're individual human beings concerned with abstractions like part of space and him talks about these to some degree but basically the human being lies at the center of his interests and in the old phrase he counts nothing human alien to him what that brings out is that in that famous subtitle to his great work which I read earlier an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning to moral subjects it's not only the phrase the experimental method of reasoning that's important which Everyone is always concentrated on but the phrase moral subjects he was applying it to everything that directly concerns human beings in my introduction to our discussion Professor Passmore when I referred to Hume moving on from writing philosophy to writing history I deliberately used the phrase he appeared to turn away from philosophy I didn't actually say he did because I know that you in your book about Hume have argued that in fact in his mind this was not a turning away at all but a continuation of the same concerns and I'd like you to expand that a little bit well I think in the first place of course the use of the word philosophy in its very narrow modern sense is uh well as I just said very narrow very modern philosophy had a much broader sense when he wrote and even later indeed in Cambridge much later physics was called natural philosophy and subjects like economics and politics were included in moral philosophy and that's the very broad sense of philosophy that Hume is working with but I think there's another thing he wrote These works the treaters as basically he said as a necessary very preliminary to working on the subjects he took to be important morals and politics an essential preliminary nobody paid any real attention to them he tried to present them in a different form as you pointed out in their introduction in the inquiries people did still didn't pay their real attention to them and it would have been absurd for him to go on working at these it had no real criticism of them he was quite convinced he was right and in terms of his own views about things it was perfectly proper for him then to go on writing essays on politics writing history writing about economics writing about the population of the ancient world and discussing all these broad issues literary criticism again which he'd always regarded as Central it would have been idiotic for him to have continued all his life with what he regarded as being only preliminary to these centrally important inquiries because all of it was in his eyes what one might roughly call social philosophy wasn't it in a very broad sense as what we would Now call social philosophy but the first part one might very crudely call hume's methodology of the social sciences it ran beyond that but it's as if a social scientist were to spend all his life talking about his methodology and never actually doing any social science and him would have felt the same way if he'd spent all his life talking about his methodology and he says it's all the logic that's really needed is in the treaters and not gone on to do the actual work that he thinks was of the greatest consequence now underlying this very broad concern with human Affairs there was a theory of human or a conception anyway of human nature and you referred to that actually a few minutes ago in our discussion can you now bring out what that conception of human nature was well it's a long story because really most of his subsequent work is a study of human nature in action in practice but one thing he never doubted was that there was such a thing as human nature and this is a point at which he differed from log Lark had been particularly intent on getting rid of the conception of original sin this was fundamentally important to him because he was a religious thinker as well as a as well as a philosopher and he had argued that human beings are born into the world with Minds which are like blank sheets of paper and then in his works on education for example the suggestion was that you could turn human beings in any direction you want to and many of the later thinkers of the French Enlightenment and really running on even to to Modern Marxism have taken this same sort of view that at least Society is the thing that makes human beings what they are now Hume didn't think that he says that he thought this was a ridiculous view that human beings do have Angus fears all the rest of it affections which are innate which are in born in them and which are constant throughout human history human in different societies they might have different forms and some of them may be strengthened and some weakened but there is a permanent human nature there in which the passions are Central it's striking I think in most of the thinkers of this period that they put an emphasis on passions and interests in a way in which many subsequent philosophers have not there are of course important exceptions to that part of the basis for what he had to say about human nature being always the same was his deep learning in The Classical Languages wasn't it he he was deeply and widely read in Greek and Latin literature and history and what struck him one of the things that struck him about those times was that human behavior in very considerable detail had been just the same two thousand years before the time he was reading then he saw it around here as he saw it around him in his own time yes he was particularly interested in writers like Cicero and in what Cicero said about human nature and human beings and human society and he thought it wasn't so different from 18th century England and that human beings were still behaving in much the same kind of way it was the Latin writers rather than the Greek writers who particularly influenced him at that level and constantly quotes sister out so that was some of the evidence that he would have given for there being a permanent human nature but also when he writes about let us say the natural history of religion it's again on the assumption that human beings have been much the same who have been faced by the same threats the same anxieties have had much the same ideals throughout history even in much earlier societies and the Greek and Romans Etc it's not only an assumption is it I mean he tries to demonstrate this with a great deal of factual example he tries to demonstrate by a factual example but it is all the same I think to some measure something that he thinks you can not seriously question although as I say many subsequent writers unlocked before him have seriously questioned her when one looks at Hume from the standpoint of our time I think one is very struck by the sort of modernity from our point of view of very much of it I mean he was centrally concerned with this problem of the self well some of the best philosophy that's been done in Britain in recent years has been about problems of the self scientists in the 20th century have been deeply puzzled especially uh in their thinking about quantum physics about the presence or absence of causal connection and only yesterday so to speak the logical positivists or at least the chief representative of logical positivism in the English-speaking World AJ air we're constantly talking about how much they owed to Hume and how almost everything they'd air is constantly saying that almost everything he has to say has previously been said by Hume one comes up against this modernity to us again and again and one of the 20th century problems of philosophy that he is credited with having formulated for the first time is the famous problem of induction isn't it that is to say that the The Logical basis on which scientific theories were traditionally said to rest can you tell us a little about that well it's very closely related to what I said previously about reality go back to my baby that's dropping this ball out of that well I suppose it does this on Monday and it does it on Tuesday and it doesn't on Wednesday and it doesn't on Thursday every time it drops the ball the ball bounces then certainly him would say it comes to believe that whenever it drops the ball the ball will bounce it comes to expect the ball to bounce whenever it drops it but suppose we ask why since all that has happened is the same thing is has occurred on many occasions but we all know quite well that things can occur on many occasions and then on some occasion they don't occur anymore there's a change in the way things happen you've been accustomed to relying on these regularities but the regularity breaks down now all the humor is saying is we can never be quite sure that this won't happen in respect to any regularity whatsoever there's no way of arguing from the premises that things have happened in a certain way on very many occasions in the past to the conclusion that they're bound to happen in exactly the same way in the future and of course the point here is that every scientific law is an unrestrictedly general statement which is said to rest on a number of particular observations or experiments or instances and The Logical link can't be made there's a marvelous example of this in act in in the history of philosophy itself in logic books in some logic books in the Middle Ages one sentence that was used as an example was all swans are white and of course for literally thousands of years every Swan that any Western man had ever seen was white and there must have been millions of instances of white swans and not a single counter-example but in the 18th century when Western man discovered your country Australia for the first time Europeans saw black swans and it's a marvelous illustration of the fact that however many thousands or millions of times a particular thing has been observed and found to be so and so it does not follow from that that the next one will be and therefore this is the logically important point no finite number of specific observations can never logically entail an unrestrictedly general or Universal conclusion but all scientific laws are of that character and therefore they are not logically entailed by the observations that are supposed to be their bases and this is an explosive Insight isn't it I mean it seemed to people to knock away the foundations of science as they understood it yes I think it's more and more widely agreed by scientists themselves and that's scientific propositions are in some measure hypothetical and many very firmly based ones have been overthrowed in the past people used to say that Einstein didn't overthrow Newton he simply produced a more general theory of which Newton's theory is part but that's not really true there are some things that Newton said and that have now been shown to be false and Newton was for a long time the Supreme example of a a kind of certain demonstrative sign Bertrand Russell in his famous book a history of Western philosophy after he's said something about hume's doctrines on these various fundamental things that we've considered the cause and effect relationship the nature of the self the inductive basis for scientific laws Russell then goes on to say that in many of these respects we still haven't got Beyond him that he pointed out very fundamental problems that no one has yet solved this is true of course secretly through the Plato pointed out very fundamental questions that nobody has yet solved it's unfortunately it's much easier in in philosophy to ask questions and to raise difficulties them to produce Solutions but I think one crucial thing about Hume is the questions he asked and I think this is also true of Plato were very fundamental ones so that we can say that if a person doesn't take hume's question seriously he can't really be counted as a philosopher yes these are absolutely fundamental to what philosophy is aren't they yes they are fundamentalists they're not the only issues which are fundamental but they are fundamental issues sort of a man was he I get the impression when I read his work and I've been rereading it for this discussion just recently I get the impression of a kind of massive Humane in this which is enormously attractive yes I you know his friend Adam Smith said he came as near to Perfection these sort of respects as any human being possibly could and biographers explored his life in great detail I don't think any of them have found a single example of a mean or a malicious action he's occasionally a bit timid well not unnaturally he had views about religion which was scarcely popular in the society in which he was living he's occasionally a little bit vain but this is a form I of seeing if it is that which I can easily forgive but he doesn't ever act meanly or maliciously and I'm quite sure that if there was a sort of celestial philosopher's party a dinner party it's David shimod want to sit next to yeah I I think in many ways Plato was the greater philosopher but it's David Schumer I would want to sit next to and I think almost everybody else would he had this warm Humanity he was without pretensions it was a man of very considerable personal courage he was dying of cancer in his last years he still received his friends as usual he knew or believed he knew that he was certainly not Immortal but this didn't disturb him in the leads it very much Disturbed possible when boss will interviewed him towards the end but he managed to retain that sort of equanimity and moderation which was his own ideal yeah and his style has had great influence hasn't it I mean I mentioned earlier in this discussion to 20th century British philosophers both of them famous AJ air and Burton Russell who have been consciously influenced by the Hume way of doing things and there'd been many others yes well he did place this great episode on Clarity and indeed on Elegance I recently heard Clarity and elegance referred to as old-fashioned virtues which nobody now attempts but certainly aired Russell attempted them and certainly Hume attempted them and he set a certain pattern of British philosophizing in which one tries to be clear one tries to be critical one tries not to make large assumptions one tries to look all the while at what one's doing in a critical spirit and one tries to tie it up to what actually happens in the world hume's approach does raise one important difficulty doesn't it you refer to the fact that he stresses that most of the things that we take for granted we don't actually know and can't prove can never prove that being so how are we to distinguish between the sort of view that it's reasonable to hold and the sort of view that it's unreasonable to hold what then becomes the Criterion of a reasonable man's belief this is a very difficult question at times him seems to be saying nothing more than that well in general it's much more sensible to rely on constant conjunctions and on mere chance he gives rules for judging of course and the fact at other times he seems to suggest there's really no answer to this question but that is something that I think would satisfy nobody and one might say that is the principal problem that Hume said I refer to it in a way a little while ago uh we agree let us say that scientific laws are not demonstrable in the strict sense why however is it still far better to depend on these in our practical Affairs of life than in some silly idea that someone thinks up in a bestseller see I think that what Hume had to say about all this is very germane to the ideas about science that most people have today in the 20th century my impression is that most people including most well-educated people have the idea of science that it consists of a body of known demonstrated proved certainties and that the growth of science consists in adding new certainties to the body of already existing ones anybody who has that view of human knowledge or that view of silence really has a very fundamental lesson to learn from Hume don't they I mean Hume retains his full power to disconcert today doesn't he yes Hume is an extremely disconcerting thinker I think it's still true in respect to science that science does make sense there's all sorts of things we know about the world we didn't know before for scientists got going but certainly when a lot of people for example think of science as something where there's no room for the imagination at all they imagine you they believe that you have all sorts of need for the imagination if you're writing a novel or writing a play but when you're doing a science it's just a question of going into a laboratory and seeing what happens now this is nonsense any kind of scientific work above the the most trivial is an enormous feat of the imagination if you take contemporary cosmology for example it's well this is admittedly a a very extreme example but it's an extraordinary imaginative feed and the same is true of things like DNA genetics any of the great discoveries require not merely careful work in Laboratories though this is essential and careful thinking at all levels but also a capacity to make imaginative leaps and it's interesting that in Hume the idea of the imagination constantly re-emerges as a beings of central importance the imagination he thinks is essential to all our thinking about the world even in what we call our perception of facts there is always an element of the imagination at work and the centrality of the imagination is one of the things I find Most Fascinating in David Hume it's directly to me into what you've just said that the greatest of all 20th century scientists Einstein once said he said in 1928 I remember he made the remark that he would never have dared to overthrow the science of Newton had he not read Hume well I'd like to I'd like to finish our discussion really by asking you to say a little more about the influence of Hume or major thinkers subsequent to him he did you've already referred to his influence on calm to I think most philosophers would regard as the greatest of all philosophers since Hume what was his influence on can't but I think that can't unlike the British critics of Hume really did see what Jim was about he's sorry had to do philosophy in a quite different kind of way and if he was going as he wanted to do to answer him and particularly to get rid of what he took to be the skeptical elements in Hume he had to say that really our perception of the world is of a quite different kind from the sort of thing that human his predecessors had taken it to be we don't assume always presumes have isolated perceptions simply following one another we from the beginning aware of things as being causally collected coarsely linked with one another one gets encounter a great emphasis on the creative power of the mind as well the suggestion of this order is in part imposed by the mind and that leads in a direction that you wouldn't have liked it leads in the direction of subsequent German idealism in the direction of writers like Hegel but can't see didn't he that if you started with empiricist assumptions Hume then posed problems that on empiricist assumptions you couldn't answer that was his people and Khan's solution was to reject the assumptions and and start holding you approach he does see I think the essential thing that if you begin from the position that what we're aware of are isolated events whether in our own mind where their perceptions are on the surface of our skin or in the world you cannot create out of them simply as your soul material the kind of ordered World which in fact we experience in our daily life well to continue the discussion Beyond this point would take us into a discussion of Khan so I think we'll stop there thank you very much indeed Professor Passmore good thank you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Metaphysics, Western Philosophy, David Hume, Empiricism, Perception, Hume, Causation, Newton, Skepticism, Objectivity, Personal Identity, The Self, Induction, Problem of Induction, Causality, Theory of Knowledge, Human Nature, Necessary Connection, Knowledge, Constant Conjunction, Bryan Magee, Hume's Fork, John Passmore, Interview, Naturalism, Laws of Nature, Social Philosophy, Philosophy, Subjectivity

Id: PV3U1w4wGPs

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023