Saturday, February 06, 2010

Hume and Kant - warming up for the main lecture!

Hume is an important thinker for us because of (a) The direct importance of his doctrines on practical journalism - especially in trying to establish what is true in the world; (b) indirectly he is important because HCJ first year are going to have a direct session on Kant and Hegel and it is hard to understand Kant and Hegel without a bit of Hume first [Kant was reacting against HUME and the nub of that was an agreement with Hume that causation could not be directly detected by humans, but the causation might/does happen in another realm (the world of the unknownable - the 'numenal' world - ). I will talk about that a bit more in a forthmcoming videolecture on Kant]. Also for YEAR TWO HCJ we come eventually to the philosophy of LOGICAL POSITIVISM (that's essentially the view of the world to which nearly all scientists would subscribe and most other educated people now subscribe. It helps when looking at Logical Positivism to know a little bit about Hume - the Positivists really love Hume because extreme caution on drawing conclusions from data is just the day job of any sort of scientist - even the lowliest lab technician, to the the people working on space exploration and a cure for cancer (hurry up!); as much as they dislike metaphysics and Kant). So there's a division in western culture you might discern here - on the one hand we have the empiricists, liberalism, science, capitalism, atheism on the one hand; and there's a basket of idealists, romanticism, art, anti-capitalism and religion on the other; then there's sensible people in the middle who have a foot in each camp or who try to synthesise the two. But by now you should be starting to be able to place political ideas, works of art, social attitudes WITHIN a sort of map or spectrum bounded by these two cultural poles of empiricism and anti-empiricism; betwen science and art; between liberalism and anti-liberalism and between open-mindedness and dogma ... put another way... to use the words of one local girl made good... between SENSE (empiricism, scepticism, cynicism, hard-headedness) and SENSIBILITY (romanticism, hope, faith, love). Like the characters in Jane Austen's novel most of us veer wildly between the two.