Hume

AK 51 Hume’s idea that certain questions do not permit of rational answers.. destructive nihilism of this can be pleasing to the young. Spurious plausibility. But a dogma in itself, and by its own standards meaningless. The judgement of meaninglessness. Hume the Tory.
Idea that it is reasonable ambition to try to change the parameters.. to desire more power.

FF 225& Importance of the philosopher Hume for the possibility of magic. Science is mathematics applied to qualities, Newton’s science as dealt with by Hume, involved certain unwarranted assumptions, notably that the concept of a cause is self explanatory, But what is a cause but an observed regularity? The patterns of a crystal may be traced back further into component atoms but is anything more explained? Hume was a greater philosopher than Kant. He dealt the death blow to deism. The world is a mathematical pattern, causation is not the key which explains it.
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YY 381 Hume on belief. Perhaps because I do not believe in Hume’s philosophy his ideas strike me with less force and vivacity than they would if I did. Scepticism can reach much further than he takes it, but in 18th century England this was actually believed. . Much of the difficulty with causation in his accent springs from this atomisation of impressions and ideas. Related to the desire for a quantifiable science. Is it only this peculiar perspective, that may one day seem bizarre and exotic, that gives rise to what seemed such an intractable problem? Is it natural to think of perception in terms of these atomised ideas and impressions?. Does such an account really make perception any more comprehensible? Is perhaps the idea of causation something to do with the understanding of continuity? Hume admits that an object may be extended. This means it is made up of contiguous parts, atoms or minima. Does not existence provide a similar problem to causation? Part of the problem, what there is in the idea beyond constant conjunction. The idea of extension contains more than the conjunction of a lot of minima

AZ 21 Hume says it is misfortune that draws people to supernatural explanations, I tend to think the reverse.

29 Hume on religion. Seems better than when I first read it, incomparable, magnificent, among the best humanity has produced.

ZZ 4 I find Hume on space interesting, the idea that there can be no empty space because the concept is illogical. Providing an alternative to our common view of space as a receptacle.

13& Hume’s philosophy. Even if we take a Wittgensteinian line against him, he is certainly saying something of universal significance. His importance for science, his influence on Einstein. How we fit our experience together in a map of reality

24& Hume on identity, causality, duration. Problem of scientism taken to its extreme, some kind of paranoia. Hume sees the ideas and impressions as somehow in a kind of mental cabinet that can be taken out and surveyed in succession, but how is it possible to get beyond the immediacy of the here and now? He says the duration of an unchanging object is measured by changes that occur in coexisting objects. This in itself divides the object into parts. How can we say these parts are of the identical object? Or perhaps we can.
Hume only takes his atomism and scepticism so far, He leaves the mind with a rich fund of ideas and impressions with which to piece together a world, but these are more fictions than he would care to admit.
Fundamental issue in all science, that of what counts as an explanation. Quantum theorists are content to dispense with causality. Hume’s building blocks, ideas impressions measured phenomena.

40& Hume's psychology, his logical systematic analysis his eighteenth century honestly about what would now be called the sadism intrinsic to society.
He is not as profound as some because he is socially at ease and gregarious, but he is more profound and honest than most twentieth century psychology with its built in need for falsification.

AB 304 Hume’s Dialogues. His attack on the argument from design is good, one could see it as a supplement to Tom Paine. But I cannot say Hume’s mild virtuous personality comes across as particularly exciting. And I cannot agree to the suggestion that the Dialogues are a greater work than the Treatise,. Perhaps they were seminal but they were soon surpassed, by the works of de Sade for example

AD 309 James and Hume

AE 120 Suggestion in Buddhist Logic that Kantian thing-in-itself is the infinitesimal point instant.. Hume’s empirical analysis by no means radical enough. This atomistic analysis into ideas as if they are things. The fact that when we make a judgement a lot of basic categories are already presupposed. It is already theoretical a great deal of possibility is supposed, that goes far beyond the immediately given.
The assumption is that we cannot justify this and we cannot do without it.
Wittgenstein in his appeal to ordinary language supposedly offers a refutation of scepticism.
This might see to be showing why we should accept certain beliefs which go beyond the immediately given.
The given, of course may be a belief or idea which repels us, which we are unwilling to accept but which seems inescapable.

AJ 46 Kripke comparin Wittgenstein to Berkeley and Hume.

A 127 Some men are obsequious, malicious, conceited and self deluded. Could there be a society of such types? To insist that they must come to grief is moral dogmatism. To insist they are repulsive on a normal human realistic, humane world view is reasonable enough. De Sade complicates matters but only by introducing an entirely new context, an unusual viewpoint.

Perhaps Butler, Hume are quite right on one level, that of the humane decent human company in which most of us are at least to some extent interested. Revolting human beings find it difficult to participate in the richness of human relations generally and at their best.

154 Hume’s ethical reasoning displays a defective understanding of the principle of self love.. He claims to prove a universal urge towards the public good. Forgetting about de Sade and the one sided view of ‘feeling’ we could say that at the very most he manages to show how benevolence towards some community of human beings actual or possible large or small. Classed as human beings there may be forms of life I despise and abhor and would wish to exterminate. I tend to subscribe to the Magian and Kantian view of morality as a form of discrimination, of finding oneself in the chaos. Hume is undoubtedly an Apollonian.

162 One good thing about Hume’s ethics is that he takes virtues at their simple face value and has no truck with Pascalian sin complexes.

AW 149 Magee and his ideas of reality. Hume’s scepticism not gong far enough. Unknowable reality what could we say it is:?

AT 342 Harrington and his ideas. Polybius derived ideas about freedom, disputed by Hume etc. Idea of the citizen army as the essential bulwark. This assumes that the old do not oppress the young, we are familiar with images from Wilfred Owen, the values of the old may not be those of the young.

356 Hume’s’ philosophy might see to make all values neutral having no connection with issues of fact.
So on this view Kant’s morality is just fiction. He creates something without factual basis like pretending that is has one.

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