Posted on 10/10/2007 8:12:38 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Oh, Borges, how can you spout this leftist socialist academic garbage. I know you did not think this up yourself.
“Locke postulated that the human mind is a Tabula Rasa (blank slate) that has nothing innate ...”
That’s right. He totally rejected the idea of a priori knowledge.
“... and which is entirely formed by physical and psychological stimuli ...”
Absolutely not. Locke was the last of the Aristotelian philosophers, and not the best of them, but he never dreamed, much less said the mind is “formed” by anything. Our ideas can only be about what is first “sensed” (what we would say is perceived) but all except the simplest ideas are formed by “reflection,” that is reason. Nothing “causes” the content of the mind, in Locke, it is our active rational process that determines the content of the mind.
Both Hume and Berkeley are not empiricists at all, and clumping them together with Locke is a terribly evil dishonest academic lie.
If what you mean by, “modern Western Culture,” is what we have today, then you are absolutely right it is the result of the Hume-Kant-Hegel influence, because today’s Culture and Society are what’s left after the destruction of Western Civilization.
Please do me a favor. I suspect you have been strongly influence by the academic liberal left that controls America’s universities today. Just have a look at the articles in this series:
http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/revolution/revolution_index.html
and begin with this one:
“The Uncivilizing Revolution of The West”
http://theautonomist.com/aaphp/revolution/revolution2.html
I’ll be very interested in your response to these, and please do not feel in the least obligated to agree with them, but do give yourself the opportunity to judge for yourself what the real history of the West has been.
Hank
I didn’t clump Locke in with Hume and Berkley I merely reffered to him as the father of Liberalism which many others have called him. Thanks for the links. I’ll look at them later today.
“Locke’s ideas about the human consciousness being entirely determined by surroundings and external stimuli ...”
That was not locke’s idea at all. Locke did not believe the content of the mind was “determined,” but developed by the volitional effort to reason about what we are conscious of—what he call “reflection.” It was Hume who introduced the idea the mind as “determined.” Hume denied volition, Locke did not.
Hank
What the author expresses is his intent whether it is conscious or subconscious. If his command of his language is inadequate then it may be impossible to divine his intent at all and his writing will go back to the primordial ooze it came from.
I didn’t question the author’s intent but stated that a text’s meaning isn’t limited to it or by it. There are about 10,000 interpretations of Hamlet and you can bet that Shakespeare didn’t intend all of them and would take exception to most of them. That doesn’t reduce the interpretations.
Hume was an Empiricist ...
Rather than discuss this, I suggest you read the next three sections of this article. I’ll ping you as they are released if you like.
After that, if you would like to insist Hume is an empiricist, I’ll be glad to entertain your arguments.
Is that fair enough for you?
Hank
Sho nuff. Never accused you of being un-fair. ;)
“Never accused you of being un-fair.”
No you didn’t, but it is just and expression.
You are on my ping list, which I’ll take you off of any time you wish.
Hope you enjoy the remaining sections of the article even if you do not agree with them.
Hank
The point is to reach an understanding of the author's intent. What somebody spirals off to later is his own business including being declared heretic and excommunicated.
That's a start, but it isn't evidence. The correct interpretation is evidence, and that requires going far beyond the text itself.
Having taken all that trouble you could write the text yourself and probably with fewer garden-path sentences, and the author could ask you what he meant.
Not sure if you’re reffering to Faulkner but its actually held by a lot of critic/biographers that he was drunk when writing a lot of those garden path sentences. Genius Will Out.
The rest of the piece consists of similar half-baked cheap shots. Firehammer's the kind of guy who doesn't realize that he lacks the intellectual candlepower to tackle the thought of men much greater than himself. It's also fascinating that he cites adamant, vigilant, remorseless, dyed-in-the-wool atheist Ayn Rand in an attack on atheist Hume. Rand's excessive, indeed extremist, inhuman and ultimately self-defeating, rationalism may have made her adverse to Hume, but that's Rand's problem, not Hume's.
Hume did undermine the foundations of metaphysics and epistemology. Neither Firehammer, armed with all the tools of argumentation, however feebly employed, that've been developed since Hume's day, nor anybody else has been able to restore the status quo ante. Kierkegaard came closest with the "leap of faith," but even that seems more and more naive to the ear of today's "serious" thinkers.
Plato is in pell-mell retreat, friends, and with him much of Christian philosophy. The Truth will continue to be served, but unsupported assertions presented as Truth - the backbone of religious dogma - have never been in deeper disrepute.
“’wear life like a loose garment,’ is a widely held principle of conservatives ... I constantly remind myself of it whenever I’m tempted to take myself too seriously.”
Seems you forgot it when composing this response.
Hank
Correct, Borges.
Hume was not a rationalist (except in the sense that he held induction up to deductive standards of certainty, and therefore found induction wanting). For instance, Hume stated that reason was “the slave of the passions”-— hardly the claim of a rationalist.
Perhaps more importantly, Hume had much in common not only with Locke but with Burke. With the latter, Hume shared an appreciation of tradition and ritual as forming the underpinnings of society, in deep contrast to the likes of Rousseau-— which is understandable when one sees how custom is built upon habit, and that habit is the lynchpin in Hume’s moral theory and epistemology.
Like Burke, Hume was a conservative. Like Locke, Hume was a liberal. Like his friend Adam Smith, Hume believed in the power of freedom to unleash man’s potential economically, but was skeptic enough to suspect any political solution a complete one.
One doesn’t have to agree with Hume’s epistemology or metaphysics or rejection of the latter (and by and large, I don’t) to see that he is a giant among philosophers. The fact that he writes so clearly and well by itself raises him above many of his peers. Besides, which, unlike most modern “postmodernists” this was a guy who really was tolerant-— he even tried to stay friends with Rousseau, who as anyone who’s read Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals” knows, he must have had quite a bit of patience to do.
For the unschooled, such as myself, having some critical analysis in depth is so valuable to be able to wade through this. In part two, I saw this damnation by Firehammer making Hume the Alpha and the Omega of PostModernism and then the defining of Post Modernism in a narrow way to set it up for a dismantling that is only done in the author's confined space.
There is some good stuff here, I don't want to say that I can argue with Firehammer, I just hate to buy into an extreme view.
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