*Do you agree with David Hume that to "prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger" would not beunreasonable ("against reason")? Why (not)?

A Timeline of Western Philosophers

Baruch Spinoza (c. 1632-1677). Isaac Newton (c. 1643-1727). Anne Conway (c. 1631-1679). Pierre Rgis. John Locke (c. 1632-1704). Major Empiricist. Political philosopher. Damaris Masham. John Toland (c. 1670-1722). Pierre Bayle (c. 1647-1706). Pyrrhonist. Madeline de Souvr.

1700-1750 CESamuel Clarke (c. 1675-1729). Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (c. 1671-1713). John Norris (c. 1657-1711). Malebranchian. Gottfried Leibniz (c. 1646-1716). Co-inventor of the calculus. George Berkeley (c. 1685-1753). Idealist, empiricist. Catherine Cockburn (c. 1679-1749). Giambattista Vico (c. 1668-1744). Bernard Mandeville (c. 1670-1733). Francis Hutcheson (c. 1694-1746). Proto-utilitarian. Joseph Butler (c. 1692-1752). Christian Wolff (c. 1679-1754). Determinist, rationalist. John Gay (philosopher). David Hume (c. 1711-1776). Empiricist, skeptic.

Rationalism versus Empiricism

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge... SEP

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). He demonstrated the possibility of understanding the world in terms of a few simple, elegant principles... In many sensitive, inquisitive personalities, the apparent conflict between science and religion was becoming unbearable. Newton was one of those personalities.

'Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken.'

Born and educated in Edinburgh, Hume wrote his first great work A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) having moved to Anjou in France. It set Hume up as an empiricist in the tradition of Locke and Berkely, but one who was hugely sceptical about what he, or indeed anybody, can know.

He continued to outline his ideas in two major works - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals (1751).

For Hume almost nothing about existence was demonstrable; just because the sun had always risen in the morning didnt mean we could know that it would rise tomorrow.

Furthermore, the idea of the sun that we had in our brain was a long way removed from the actual sun as it existed. He applied this to the concept of beauty saying "Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them".

Although he took scepticism to the extremes, Hume acknowledged its irrelevance to every day life and was quite capable of applying his mind to a whole range of practical issues such as economics, trade and finance.

His Political Discourses of 1752, for example, anticipated the economics of Adam Smith.

Regarding the existence of God, Humes position was an incisive agnosticism but this was enough to have him barred from professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities. IOTIEPSEP

Hume was consistently skeptical to the end...

However, he gained a position as keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh and wrote his best-selling History of England (1754-62).

He also became secretary to the British ambassador in Paris and is reputed to have cut quite a dash in French society.

Hume died at approximately four o'clock in the afternoon on 25 August 1776 in Edinburgh. As his death approached, crowds gathered to see whether or not he would embrace Christianity in his last moments. TPM Hume

James Boswell recounts that Hume "said he never had entertained any belief in Religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke. . . .

He then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said 'that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Human nature is inherently good, but corrupted by society and private property. .. The ideal of the natural goodness of humanity replaced the age-old notion of original human sin... self-reliance became the primary civic virtue... education an individual right and political necessity.

In the latter part of 1765, Hume helped Rousseau to flee Switzerland and France, where he had been persecuted for sedition and impiety, for the protection of England. Rousseau, however, came to believe that Hume was in league with his enemies and broke off all connection with him. TPM

They were an odd couple, the Enlightenment's two most daring explorers of the maze of human nature. The friendship, though, quickly fell apart. Its collapse, as Hume sadly noted, "made [a] great ... noise all over Europe." Echoes of this "noise" still reach us today, reminding us of the fragility of reason, even when exercised by the most lucid minds.

"Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man."-David Hume

Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.-Jean Jacques Rousseau

Children should be educated "naturally" - allowed to develop their higher moral natures in their own way, at their own pace. Do you agree? Is this the way we educate children already, in the U.S.? What educational reforms would you favor?

David Hume (1711-1776)

Hume was a happy skeptic and an"unrepentant atheist" who "consoledhimself with long walks, drinking,and gambling."

He was not, however, an immoralman. He simply believed that wemust look to something other thanreason, conceived strictly as anintellectual faculty, to make sense ofour moral lives.

"If reason cannot guarantee morals, our human natures nevertheless supply us with adequate sentiments [and "common sense," guided by "socialtraditions"] to behave rightly towardone another.

David Hume on reason and sentiment... reasonalone cannot motivate us to be good. Conscience comes fromfeeling.

More on David Hume

"We believe in all sorts of laws of nature which we cannot ourselves understand merely because men whom we admire and trust vouch for them."

We might do well to follow Hume in preferring to invoke the idea of constancies and habits, and of constant conjunctions of events and the feelings or ideas we habitually conjoin to them. These feelings or ideas, or as Hume (and Locke) said, these sensations and reflections, may be constant in our experience, but for all we know they are also contingent, hence unnecessary.

So we should be ever watchful for evidence that things arent exactly as they had seemed, and that (to paraphrase Mark Twain) much that we know just isnt so. "New facts burst old rules.

Hume was an empiricist, like John Locke, George Berkeley, and (later) John Stuart Mill. Empiricists are committed to the view that our knowledge of things comes to us originally through our senses.

TPM Mill

Locke was famous for speaking of the tabula rasa or blank slate, his popular and familiar metaphor suggesting that newborns enter the world free of preconception and literally without ideas or beliefs (instincts would be something different).

George Berkeley (1685-1753). Berkeleys version of empiricism is surprising, if your notion of an empiricist is of a hard-nosed and common-sensical inquirer into nature. Berkeley denied that we even have any reason to assert the existence of nature, conceived as a mind-independent world external to our minds and their ideas.

His metaphysical idealism was a direct consequence of taking Lockes primary-&-secondary quality distinction seriously: he insisted that we know only our ideas.

Esse ist percipi

Everything we experience is in the mind... to be is to be perceived by somebody... or by God.

As with Leibniz and his monads, or self-contained conscious beings coordinated by God to experience something indistinguishable from what we in fact experience, Berkeley places God at the core of his philosophy.

If you could be permanently hooked up to amachine that would give you the experiencesof having friends, fame, wealth, good looks,success, or whatever else makes you happy,would you? Why (not)?

(See Lyle Zynda's comments on Robert Nozick's thought experiment:

*Zynda, Lyle. Was Cypher Right? Part II: The Nature of Reality and Why It Matters. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix. Ed. GlennYeffeth. Dallas: BenBella Books. 2003. 33-43.

More philosophy in The Matrix...

"Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's desires?

Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?" Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1971 (43)

CYPHER You know, I know that this steak doesn't exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I've realized? Pausing, he examines the meat skewered on his fork. He pops it in, eyes rolling up, savoring the tender beef melting in his mouth. CYPHER Ignorance is bliss. AGENT SMITH Then we have a deal? CYPHER I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing! You understand? And I want to be rich. Someone important. Like an actor. You can do that, right?

AGENT SMITH Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan. Cypher takes a deep drink of wine. CYPHER All right. You get my body back in a power plant, reinsert me into the Matrix and I'll get you what you want. AGENT SMITH Access codes to Zion. CYPHER I told you, I don't know them. But I can give you the man who does. AGENT SMITH Morpheus.

Adam Smith (1723-1790), Humes best friend. Father of free enterprise. Wealth of Nations (1776) the bible of capitalism. Self-interest in the public good, but he did not say greed is good.

He believed that people are not essentially selfish but are essentially social creatures... a decent free-enterprise system would only be possible in the context of such a society.

Smith believed that people are NOT essentially selfish or self-interested but are essentially social creatures who act out of sympathy and fellow-feeling for the good of society as a whole. (88) Can capitalism in our time work, then? Or are we indeed close to socialism, with this view?

Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.

He intends only his own security, only his own gain. And he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

This makes Smith sound as if he thought that the invisible hand always leads individuals who are pursuing their own interests to promote the good of society. He did not... Atlantic

Those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments."