Of all the philosophers he [Anthony Gottlieb, the author of ‘The Dream of Enlightenment’] discusses, his favorite seems to be Hume, who went furthest in rejecting the deductive, geometrical ideal in philosophy. Spinoza wanted a knowledge of the world that was as certain as the truths of mathematics, but Hume pointed out that this was a category mistake. All our knowledge of the world depends on experience, which means that it is contingent, not absolute. We can, of course, trust that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, just as it did yesterday and every day before that. But we can’t prove that it will rise in the same way we can prove that two plus two is four. “ ’Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life, but custom,” Hume concluded.
In Hume’s view, Descartes’s program of demolishing the world through doubt and then rebuilding it through logic is bound to fail. Instead, we have to accept that our knowledge of the world is not absolute, as much as we might like it to be. There is no surefire way to breach the gulf between subjective and objective—what happens in my mind and what happens out there in the world. This is equally true of the next world: Hume was comfortably skeptical about religion’s promise of life after death. Gottlieb tells the story of how James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, visited Hume on his deathbed, hoping to find that at the last minute the philosopher would abjure his doubts and embrace Christianity. But Boswell was disappointed to hear Hume affirm “that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever.” Much of the philosophy of the early modern period might now strike us as another kind of unreasonable fancy. But we are still living with the problems that these thinkers formulated and tried to solve. We are never quite as modern as we think.
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Adam Kirsch, Are We Really So Modern?
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/149983200977
