Tag: David Hume

Detail of Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787.

1,790 words

“Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer, Remark made to Christoph Martin Wieland

I am a philosopher, drawn to philosophy from an early age, initially Plato’s Dialogues. I’ve also been rewarded with a long healthy life (I am 78 years old) which has been incalculably enriched by being able to read, write, teach and think about things philosophical. Some of the most intense, satisfying memories of my life are those comprised of recalling a particular book I had read that profoundly challenged or changed my way of thinking—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. (more…)

2,427 words

“Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realizes that every day is a day when he is dying? In fact, we are wrong to think that death lies ahead: much of it has passed us by already, for all our past life is in the grip of death.”—Seneca, Epistle 1.2 (more…)

A seventeenth-century engraving of Diogenes Laertius (image courtesy of Wikipedia).

2,377 words

The Milesian philosophers were wrong about everything, but they asked the right questions, and for the first time sought natural explanations instead. — Luke Mueshaller, Pre-Socratics: A Painless Introduction

The limit of all wisdom is in me. — Epigram on Pythagoras, Boundaries, Duris

Although the twilight is darkening around Western philosophy, she is still just visible through the gloom. She had already been demoted from her role as theology’s handmaiden and queen of the sciences to a kind of antiquarian pursuit, like collecting moths in glass-covered frames or old jazz records. (more…)

George Grant

1,844 words

George Grant’s Lament for a Nation was most obviously wrong in its immediate predictions about Canada. He thought that Anglo-Canada would seek direct annexation by the dynamic American Republic. Many of his errors stem from a conflation of economics with cultural and political destiny.

Even now that Canada is almost entirely economically absorbed into the United States, annexation remains a fringe position. Most Canadians opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s; the draw of consumption could not overcome national attachment, even one as meaningless as ours. (more…)

Bertrand Russell

1,927 words

We do not regard any of the senses as wisdom, yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. — Aristotle, Metaphysics

And it’s 1-2-3-4-5
Senses working overtime.
— XTC, “Senses Working Overtime”

The philosopher has a defining trait which, although he shares it with other disciplines, was the first to show the centrality of the self in asking questions of the world. He is thus his own object of study. (more…)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2,012 words

He [Rousseau] had nothing new, but he set everything on fire. — Madame de Staël

Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism. — Shigalev, in Dostoevsky’s The Devils

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not Karl Marx is the real father and inspiration for the theater of the absurd that is today’s Left. Rousseau’s “Man is born free, everywhere he is in chains” is the original formulation of the adolescent anarchist rally-cry, “Rage against the machine!” (more…)

Portrait by Joshua Reynolds

5,714 words

How fares the Truth now? — Ill?
— Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
— Thomas Hardy, “Lausanne, In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11-12 p.m.”
The 110th anniversary of the completion of the Decline and Fall at the same hour and place

Edward Gibbon was born in Putney, England on May 8, 1737. He was the sole survivor of a family with seven children; he had five brothers and one sister who all died in infancy. (more…)

Gustave Doré, The Fall of Lucifer

3,236 words

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? — Jeremiah 17:9

Unde malum? Where does evil come from? I first pondered that question as a child, a childhood of full immersion in a fundamentalist, Baptist Weltanschauung. Evil’s origin and its persistence in the world was the central motif in the narrative of the Great Rebellion, the failure of Angel Lucifer’s insurrection against God. The origin of evil came from a titanic battle of supernatural beings. (more…)

7,156 words

1. Introduction

The thesis of this essay is that it is wise to be superstitious. To put it differently, I will argue that my readers should be superstitious — or that they should embrace the superstitious nature they already have (for most of us have it), rather than try to disown superstition. (more…)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, left, and David Hume.

3,901 words

“No good deed goes unpunished,” as the old saw goes. It puts a cynical, waggish twist on the perspicacious observation that acts of genuine generosity and kindness too often come to grief. Benefactors beware! Shades of Thomas Hobbes: “Man to man is a wolf.” (more…)

Allan Ramsey, David Hume, 1766.

5,513 words

A Very Bad Year

2020 was a bad year for David Hume (1711-1776). Leftists in the United Kingdom, eager to get in on the feast of outrage that followed the drug overdose of George Floyd, complained that David Hume was a racist and should therefore not be revered. And then things went more or less as you would expect. (more…)

1974 West German Bundespost stamp, commemorating Kant’s 250th birthday

5,568 words

Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here

1. Introduction

In the previous essay in this series, we saw Heidegger claiming that Leibniz “prepares” the completion of the metaphysical tradition, but that it is Nietzsche who actually brings it about. I will devote a future essay to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, but we may note here that the completion of metaphysics would have been impossible without Kant, who answers Leibniz and inadvertently prepares the way for Nietzsche. (more…)

Mr. Gurdjieff

7,589 words

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born on this day in 1866, 1872, or 1877 — depending on whom you ask. [1] Much else about his biography is equally uncertain. We do know that his father was Greek, his mother Armenian, and that he was born in Alexandropol which was then part of the Russian Empire (it is now in Armenia and is called Gyumri). (more…)