Kames and the Argument from Perceptual Reliability

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas McDermid
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Perceptual Realism

Critic and cousin to David Hume, Henry Home (1696–1782)—or Lord Kames, as he was known after his appointment to the Court of Session in 1752—had remarkably varied intellectual interests. His principal philosophical work is Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751, revised in 1758 and again in 1779), which contains constructive rejoinders to many of the sceptical arguments presented by Hume and Berkeley. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse Kames’s little-known defence of perceptual realism as it was set forth in the 1751 version of his Essays. As will become apparent in Chapter 3, Kames’s views about the nature of perception anticipated and inspired Thomas Reid’s plea for the view that we have immediate knowledge of a mind-independent world. This makes Kames the de facto founder of the Scottish common sense realist tradition.

Incomplete Routes to Moral Objectivity: Four Variants of Naturalism

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-217
Author(s):  
David Sidorsky
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
David Hume ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Moral Objectivity ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
History Of ◽  
Integrated Or

The search for moral objectivity has been constant throughout the history of philosophy, although interpretations of the nature and scope of objectivity have varied. One aim of the pursuit of moral objectivity has been the demonstration of what may be termed its epistemological thesis, that is, the claim that the truth of assertions of the goodness or rightness of moral acts is as legitimate, reliable, or valid as the truth of assertions involving other forms of human knowledge, such as common sense, practical expertise, science, or mathematics. Another aim of the quest for moral objectivity may be termed its pragmatic formulation; this refers to the development of a method or procedure that will mediate among conflicting moral views in order to realize a convergence or justified agreement about warranted or true moral conclusions. In the ethical theories of Aristotle, David Hume, and John Dewey, theories that represent three of the four variants of ethical naturalism (defined below) that are surveyed in this essay, the epistemological thesis and the pragmatic formulation are integrated or combined. The distinction between these two elements is significant for the present essay, however, since I want to show that linguistic naturalism, the fourth variant I shall examine, has provided a demonstration of the epistemological thesis about moral knowledge, even if the pragmatic formulation has not been successfully realized.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Humean Skepticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-236
Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Pyrrhonian Skepticism ◽  
Academic Skepticism

Richard Popkin famously argued that David Hume “maintained the only consistent Pyrrhonian point of view”; yet Hume explicitly rejected Pyrrhonism, as he understood it, in favor of a mitigated “Academic” skepticism. The keys to understanding Hume’s relationship to Pyrrhonism lie partly in his own historical understanding of it, but even more in his own distinctive and non-Pyrrhonian theories of belief and evidence, theories that allow him to employ common sense and reflection to correct what he regards as “excessive” skeptical doubts. Central to those theories, in turn, are his conceptions of causal reasoning and of the causal relation itself. Ultimately, it is on the topic of the nature of causation that Hume comes closest to a Pyrrhonian outlook.

Brown, Thomas (1778–1820)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Bryant
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Simple Substance ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
The Mind

Thomas Brown was the last prominent figure in the Scottish philosophical tradition deriving from David Hume and Thomas Reid. Like Reid, he took the mind’s knowledge about itself to be a datum it is pointless to challenge or try to justify, since no other grounds can be more certain for us. But he defended Hume’s account of causation as nothing more than invariable succession. The mind, therefore, is a simple substance, whose successive states are affected by and affect the states of physical objects: the laws according to which these changes take place are no harder to grasp than the effects of gravitation. Brown’s lectures, published as delivered daily to Edinburgh students, seek to classify the laws of the mind so that we can conveniently understand ourselves, and direct our lives accordingly; the last quarter of his course draws conclusions for ethics and natural religion.

George Combe and common sense

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN DYDE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Relative Success ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mind

AbstractThis article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.

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