David Hume

David Hume's statements on ethics foreshadowed those of 20th century emotivists via Wikipedia

David Hume (1711-76) was a Scottish philosopher who developed a naturalist perspective on all aspects of human life.

For Hume, the highest good is based on the pursuit of happiness. We are personally happy when we’re good to others, not due to some high spiritual reward but because this approach leads to a harmonious social whole. So personal and social well-being go hand in hand.

This means that morality isn’t based on austere rational principles but on the desire for enjoyment. Accordingly, Hume believes that reason cannot determine anything without experience. And he goes as far to say that reason is the “slave of passion.”

Hume’s metaphysics, in particular his critique of the belief in cause and effect, remains an important challenge to our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.

In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:

Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination.¹

Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” But ideas they simply are. Although we expect the billiard balls to move, we have no way of proving or knowing that they always will.

At first, this may seem absurd. But Hume’s critique of causality had a profound effect on one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant.  Mortimer Adler says “…Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.”²

In addition, on a quantum level of reality, contemporary physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.

However, some say it’s invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects which they make up.

This debate continues to this day, the answer to which might depend on one’s core beliefs and related worldview. Or in Hume’s terms, one’s “customs of thought.”

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¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.

² Adler, Mortimer J. (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Simon & Schuster. p. 94, cited at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#cite_note-2

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George Berkeley

George Berkeley is credited with the development of subjective idealism. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

George  Berkeley (1685-1753) was the Anglican Dean of Derry (1724), bishop of Cloyne (1734) and an important philosopher belonging to the school of idealism. Born in Ireland, Berkeley moved to Oxford in 1752 and became one of the so-called British empiricists.

Berkeley believed that the material world exists as an idea created in our minds, ultimately by God. In his New theory of Vision (1709), he argued that our sense of distance isn’t directly perceived but inferred from the repeated association of visual and tactile cues. All of existence, itself, is a group of interacting minds, connecting with archetypes, which themselves derive from God.

He uttered the famous line, perhaps adapted from Shakespeare,

To be is to be perceived or a perceiver.

This means that existence is either a mind or stimuli in a mind.

One way that Berkeley tried to support his view was to note that the idea of heat – what the philosopher John Locke called  a “secondary quality” – is somewhat relative. If one of our hands is cold and the other hot, and we place them into warm water, the one hand feels hot and the other cold. Anyone can do this little experiment and see that it’s true. However, Berkeley added that Locke’s so-called “primary qualities” (e.g. shape, quantity) were also dependent on a perceiving mind. Berkeley, in fact, challenged the entire distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as elaborated upon at Wikipedia:

Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oil on canvas. 76×64 cm. Britain, 1697. Source of Entry: Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Berkeley maintains that the ideas created by sensations are all that people can know for sure. As a result, what is perceived as real consists only of ideas in the mind. The crux of his argument is that once an object is stripped of all its secondary qualities, it becomes very problematic to assign any acceptable meaning to the idea that there is some object. Not that we can’t picture to ourselves (in our minds) that some object exists apart from any perceiver—we clearly think we can do this—but rather, can we give any content to this idea in any particular case?¹

A slightly different take on the belief that the material world doesn’t exist independent of the mind has been popularized in many books reporting recent discoveries in sub-atomic physics, such as Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters and Fritzoff Capra’s The Turning Point.

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¹
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction#Berkeley.27s_Criticism

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Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner playing tic-tac-toe against a trained chicken (not pictured). It is noted that despite playing numerous games, Skinner was never able to defeat the bird. – Via Tumblr

Behaviorism is a psychological theory that sees mankind as operating more like a machine than as a free agent. Its modern form arose in reaction to so-called armchair philosophers, depth psychologists and alleged mystics who tried to understand human motivation in terms of what went on inside the mind or soul. For behaviorists, what really counts is what we can directly observe—in a word, behavior.

This approach is traceable to thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke David Hume, George Berkeley and David Hartley. Hobbes viewed man as a natural and social creature, while the others stressed the importance of the association of ideas.

In 1739, the so-called British empiricist philosopher David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature:

The qualities, from which…association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz. resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.¹

Most will say that the scientific study of behaviorism begins with the Russian, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who conditioned dogs to salivate not just at the sight of food but also at the sound of a bell that preceded feeding.

The American psychologist J. B. Watson (1878-1958) generalized these findings to human beings, emphasizing the importance of recency and frequency. This means that if we’ve smiled every time we’ve seen a child for the past ten years, we’re very likely to smile if we see a child today. The American B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) extended this system to include the idea of positive and negative reinforcement.

Image via Tumblr

Pavlov’s type of learning is usually called classical conditioning, while Skinner’s is called operant conditioning. Skinner soon became the most popular advocate of behaviorism. He argues that past reinforcements determine behavior. We learn to repeat or decline behaviors based on their consequences. This is called the Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement (S-R-R) model.

Skinner also formulated the idea of shaping. By controlling the environmental rewards and punishments for behaviors, one is able to shape behavior. Psychologist also call this behavior modification.

Critics of behaviorism say it depicts a soulless, mechanistic view of mankind. Instead of resembling a pleasure-seeking machine, critics say that human beings are uniquely free, replete with emotional, intuitive, intellectual and spiritual concerns extending well beyond the narrow confines of reward and punishment.

Image via Tumblr

Daniel Dennett contends that human beings are Skinnerian, Popperian and also Darwinian creatures. This means that we learn from stimulus, response and reinforcement but we also have the inner ability to test our hypotheses prior to enacting them in the real world.

This challenges Skinner’s anti-mentalism, as does Dennett’s Darwinian component. According to Dennett we act partially in accord with ancestrally acquired knowledge. A good example of this can be found in our capacity for language. Because of our language skills, many believe that human beings are hard-wired to learn languages. And we do, in fact, learn language if we’re raised in the right kind of environment, whereas a child parented by wolves in the wild won’t learn how to speak a language.²

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¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature London: Collins, 1962 [1739], p. 54.

² Wittgenstein’s notion of a private language might seem to challenge this idea. But Wittgenstein, himself, argues that any kind of representation that isn’t socially shared cannot truly be language. More recently, the postmodern notion of connotation complicates this claim. Some postmoderns ask:  If everyone understands signs differently, are we really communicating?

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Causality

Spurious Causality by y3rdua via Flickr

Causality is the belief that a second event is the consequence of a first event. This is usually described as a relationship between a cause (first event) and an effect (second event).¹ Not everyone sees causality as a belief. But from a mature philosophical perspective, that’s exactly what it is.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle saw causality in terms of four interrelated causes or explanatory factors:

• The material cause: The raw material used to make an object (e.g. wood)
• The formal cause: What the object will be (e.g. a chair)
• The efficient cause: How the object is created (builder)
• The final cause: The object’s function or purpose (it is used for sitting)

This teleological perspective is based on Aristotle’s belief that a valid distinction can be made between a thing’s essence and its observable form.²

Perhaps in keeping with Aristotle’s idea of a “formal cause,” Michelangelo said that, when sculpting, he simply removed the stone that hid the figure already existing within.

The idea of one event causing another event has been critically examined. The philosopher David Hume suggested that the idea of causality is nothing more than an expectation based on past experience and human limitations.

David Hume (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hume’s critique of the belief in cause and effect challenges our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.

In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection:

Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination.³

Put differently, from prior experience we build up a series of expectations and habitual ways of interpreting observations. Hume calls these “ideas.” But ideas they simply are. Although we expect the billiard balls to move, we have no way of proving or knowing that they always will.

At first, this may seem absurd. But Hume’s critique of causality had a profound effect on one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant. Mortimer Adler says “…Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.”⁴

Particle tracks in a cloud chamber by Ethan Hein via Flickr

In addition, developments in subatomic physics, especially concerning particle reaction chambers, have challenged many longstanding assumptions about causality. On a quantum level of reality, contemporary physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.⁵

This radical uncertainty is reflected in the arts and in the depth psychiatry of C. G. Jung, whose concept of synchronicity suggests the possibility of non-causality or acausality.

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¹ Wikipedia gives a standard definition that most would accept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

² A distinction that the Catholic Church adheres to when explaining the efficacy of the Eucharist.

³ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.

⁴ Adler, Mortimer J. (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Simon & Schuster. p. 94, cited at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#cite_note-2

⁵ Some argue, however, that it’s invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects which they make up.

On the Web:

• “Aristotle on Causality“
• “Causation: Eastern and Western Views“

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Determinism

Pocket watch, savonette-type (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Determinism is the belief popularized by John Stuart Mill that choice and free will are unreal. In determinism, every event is the outcome of previous causes and nature is believed to be uniform. Moreover, the notion of chance is merely a concept incorrectly used by those unaware of all previous causes.

This differs from the idea of fatalism, where things unavoidably happen but not necessarily from previous causes. For instance, with fatalism a sovereign transcendent power or powers could arbitrarily decide what will happen to mere mortals. This is a widespread idea, not particular to recent religions. For example, the Homeric Fates were able to have power over the future.¹

The distinction between determinism and fatalism is further outlined at Wikipedia:

Fatalism is normally distinguished from “determinism”.^[3] Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future. Notice that fate has arbitrary power. Fate also need not follow any causal or otherwise deterministic laws.^[1] Types of Fatalism include Theological determinism and the idea of predestination, where there is a God who determines all that humans will do. This may be accomplished either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience^[4] or by decreeing their actions in advance.²

This quotation raises some difficult philosophical questions. For instance, does God knowing in advance what we will do mean the same thing as God determining what we will do? Some say yes, and others no. On the yes side, we could say that God created everything in the first place, and having full knowledge (omniscience) not only knows but also is responsible for what we do. On the other side, the no side, we could say that God creates us with free will. Although God knows how we will choose, we are totally free to go any way we wish. This latter argument is usually held by Christian theologians while the former crops up among agnostics and atheists (atheists do not believe in God but may use the argument to try to lampoon the whole idea of God).

In philosophy, many have carried the banner of determinism, including Thomas Hobbes and David Hume.

¹ The Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition, Ted Honderich (Ed.) p. 208.

² 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

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René Descartes

Descartes Coffee, Chicago: Larry Miller via Flickr

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French lawyer, philosopher and mathematician often hailed as the father of modern philosophy.

While serving in the Bavarian army he devised an ambitious scheme for unifying truth with a rational model based on mathematics, physics, morality and medicine.

As a philosopher, Descartes questioned so many issues that he’s known for his ‘method of doubt,’ outlined in Discours de la Méthode (1637), the Meditationes de prima Philosophia (1641) and the Principia Philosophiae (1644).

Descartes made a fundamental distinction between mind and matter, the latter to include the body. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle said, somewhat pejoratively, that for Descartes the mind is like a “ghost in the machine,” the machine representing the body.

Descartes is probably best known for arguing that the very act of thinking proves one’s existence: cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). His next question, not unlike that of solipsism, was: “how do I know that the outside world truly exists?”

He was not the first to look at things this way. Thomas Leahey notes that

St. Augustine [354–430 CE] had said, “If I am deceived, I exist,” and Parmenides [515-445 BCE] had said, “For it is the same thing to think and to be.”¹

Descartes’ answer to the problem of truth seeming to be only inside oneself (that is, truth as entirely subjective) involved God. For Descartes, God exists by necessity. God must exist in order to be perfect. A perfect God also by necessity is Good. And a God that is Good would not deceive his creatures into believing in an outside world if no such thing existed.

Often lampooned by contemporary professors for saying the pineal gland mediates among body, mind and soul, we’d do well to remember that,  given the medical knowledge of his day, this was an innovative and arguably rational attempt on the part of Descartes to explain the relation between body and spirit.

In mathematics Descartes developed algebra and contributed to major innovations in geometry.

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¹Leahey, Thomas H. A History of Psychology, Prentice Hall, 1980, p. 92.

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Ethics

Burning of Sodomites for Homosexuality (Photo credit: Jesus In Love)

Ethics is a branch of knowledge and philosophical inquiry concerned with moral ideals, choices and the good or bad actions which may or may not follow from those choices.

Ethics may focus on personal, social and spiritual issues, separately but often in relation to one another.

Within world religions, ethical decrees might seem fixed within a given faith tradition. But various schools of interpretation usually coexist, usually with some degree of tension—e.g. the Protestant acceptance of female and in some instances homosexual ministers vs. the Catholic rule of an exclusively male priesthood and homosexual acts being specified in the catechism as “intrinsically disordered.”¹

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¹ See
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/2357.htm

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Epicurus

Epicurus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Epicurus (c.341-270 BCE) was a Greek materialist philosopher, born on the island of Samos who founded a school at Mitylene in 310 BCE. In 305 BCE he opened a school of philosophy in Athens, leading an exemplary life of simplicity and temperance.

From a few extant letters and fragments, we learn that Epicurus believed that happiness was the highest good and that life ended at the point of death. This was not the path of wanton hedonism, as some medieval Christian opponents suspected, but rather deliverance from pain and worry.

The Christian disdain for Epicurus, aside from his disbelief in the afterlife, was exacerbated by some of his followers who advocated sensual pleasure-seeking as the highest goal in life. While Epicurus did see pleasure and pain as standards against which to measure a successful or unsuccessful life, he also advocated restraint. And his understanding of pleasure was more akin to the notion of tranquility than a succession of ephemeral thrills.

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Epicurism

Epicurian Postcard / Epicure de Rappel (Photo credit: Pierre Metivier)

Today, epicurism usually means the pursuit of pleasure, as in fine cuisine, wine-tasting, etc. This everyday usage distorts the original doctrines of the philosophical school of Epicureanism.

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Enlightenment

Enlightenment (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the Buddhist sense enlightenment means achieving absolute spiritual realization through loss of the ego and, ultimately, one’s individuality. Once enlightened the Buddhist believes they’re no longer reborn and, and through the annihilation of any kind of individuality, even spiritual individuality, they apparently free themselves from suffering.

Unlike Christianity, Buddhism has no positive sense of individuality, not even spiritual individuality in the afterlife. Being an individual is just bad news in Buddhism.

A spiritual meaning for the word enlightenment is not restricted to Buddhism, however. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that, as far back as 1621, enlightenment has been used in Christianity to refer to the idea that God illuminates individual souls and that such souls are powerless to illuminate themselves with divine grace and understanding.

1621   R. Aylett Song of Songs i. iv. iv. 83   The Word, without the Spirits enlightenment, Is as good Seede sowne on vntilled ground.¹

The picture shows a gathering of distinguished guests in the drawing-room of French hostess Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699-1777) who is seated on the right. There is a bust of Voltaire in the background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the historical sense the period of “The Enlightenment” refers to an 18^th-century philosophical movement emerging out of the 17^th-century Scientific Revolution, to include the works of Adam Smith, Locke, Hume and Newton. It advocated reason and education over what was regarded as superstition, blind faith and historically laden dogmas. So in this context, the word enlightenment has a totally different meaning than the quotation above.

1836   N. Amer. Rev. July 176   When he [sc. Tieck] made his first appearance, it was, under the banner of Nicolai, as one of the Berlin advocates of enlightenment and reason, and enemies of superstition and mysticism.²

The Enlightenment championed the idea of “progress” as a challenge to entrenched forms of Christianity; however the idea of progress, and all the unspoken connotations that go with it, is now questioned by many. In France the Enlightenment produced the first great encyclopedias of Diderot and d’Alembert, with contributions from leading figures like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet and Rousseau.

In the Western contemporary sense enlightenment means a novel thought, a new way of looking at things, insight or the dispelling of ignorance.

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¹ OED third edition, November 2010; online version March 2012. <http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/view/Entry/62448&gt;; accessed 01 May 2012. An entry for this word was first included in New English Dictionary, 1891.

² Ibid.