The Oxford Handbook of Hume

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Clear View ◽  
The Core ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
English Speaking

David Hume (1711–1776) is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential of the English-speaking philosophers. The range of his contributions is considerable: covering issues of metaphysics and epistemology, mind and emotion, morality and politics, history, economics, and religion. Although there is little debate about the importance and significance of Hume’s philosophical contributions, there is, nevertheless, considerable debate about the interpretation of his overall philosophical achievement as well as his particular aims and intentions with respect to the specific topics he addresses. Beyond this, there is also considerable disagreement about the critical assessment or plausibility of the various arguments and positions that Hume advances. This collection aims to provide a comprehensive set of analyses and assessments of the key components and aspects of Hume’s philosophical work. The contributions are drawn from among the leading figures of contemporary philosophy and Hume scholarship with a view to providing readers not only with an understanding of the core themes and features of Hume’s philosophy but also with a clear view of the central debates concerning the interpretation and assessment of Hume’s philosophy at the present time. This volume constitutes the most substantial and ambitious collection devoted exclusively to Hume’s philosophy.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Rationalist Empiricism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Brown
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Digital Photography ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

Righting Epistemology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bredo Johnsen
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Equilibrium Theory ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Nelson Goodman ◽  
The Core ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Rule Out

David Hume launched a historic revolution in epistemology, but allies appeared only in the twentieth century, in the persons of Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, and W. V. Quine. Hume’s second great contribution to the field was to propose reflective equilibrium theory as the framework within which to understand epistemic justification. The core of this book comprises an account of these developments from Hume to Quine, and an extension of reflective equilibrium theory that renders it a general theory of epistemic justification concerning our beliefs about the world. In chapters on Sextus, Descartes, Wittgenstein, and various aspects of Hume’s epistemology, the author defends new readings of those philosophers’ writings on skepticism and notes significant relationships among their views. Finally, in appendices on Hilary Putnam’s “Brains in a Vat” and Fred Dretske’s contextualism, the author shows that both fail to rule out the possible truth of radical skeptical hypotheses. This is not surprising, since those hypotheses are in fact possible. They do not, however, have any epistemological significance, since epistemic justification is a function of the extent to which our bodies of beliefs are in reflective equilibrium, and no extant conception of knowledge is of any epistemological interest.

scholarly journals LEXICAL MEANS OF VERBALIZATION OF THE ENGLISH CONCEPT HAIR

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
N.M. Mikava
Keyword(s):  
Social Group ◽  
English Language ◽  
Body Hair ◽  
Facial Hair ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Somatic Feature ◽  
The Given

The article is devoted to the consideration of the features of the verbalization of the concept HAIR in the English language. The purpose of the work is to examine the structure of the English concept HAIR as a fragment of the English-language picture of the world of the English-speaking society. The main attention is focused on the analysis of the language embodiment of the given concept in the naïve and professional varients of the picture of the world. The English concept HAIR is a fragment of the conceptual picture of the world, which is reflected in the language picture of the world, namely in its three fragments, verbalized by the constituents of the lexical-semantic groups, distinguished according to the somatic feature. They are head hair, facial hair, body hair. The analysis of the language and speech material showed that the structure of the English concept HAIR in the naive picture of the world is a three-component formation, which consists of a core, a nuclear zone and a periphery. The core includes such conceptual features as somatic and gender. The nuclear zone includes objective and various associative conceptual features, namely: age, thinness, protection, beauty, strength / success, value. The periphery of the concept consists of socially-identifying functions - professional, religious and social-group. The core of the concept HAIR in the professional picture of the world includes such conceptual features as somatic, gender, structure and development. The nuclear zone includes objective conceptual features, namely: health, age, protection. The periphery of the concept consists of professional, religious, and social-group social-identifying functions. Thus the periphery of the given concept in the two variants of the picture of the world is identical. The prospects for further research are seen in the consideration of the mentioned aspects of verbalization on the material of English artistic speech as well as professional discourse.

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.

Alter Orbis: E. A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
World Order ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Racial History ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American

This essay analyses E. A. Freeman’s views on the past, present, and future of the British Empire. It elucidates in particular how his understanding of Aryan racial history and the glories of Ancient Greece helped to shape his account of the British Empire and its pathologies. Freeman was deeply critical of both the British Empire in India and projects for Imperial Federation. Yet he was no ‘little Englander.’ Indeed, it is argued that Freeman’s scepticism about modern European forms of empire-building was informed by an ambition to establish a globe-spanning political community composed of the ‘English-speaking peoples’. At the core of this imagined racial community, united by kinship and common citizenship, stood the Anglo-American connection, and Freeman repeatedly sought to convince people on both sides of the Atlantic about their collective history and their shared destiny. For Freeman, the institutions of formal empire stood in the way of this grandiose vision of world order.

Paradoxes of Engagement with Irish Language Community Management, Practice, and Ideology

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Language Policy ◽  
Management Practice ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Management ◽  
Language Community ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
The Core ◽  
English Speaking

Since gaining independence in 1922, the Irish Government’s pro-Irish language policy has gone through several stages of development, moving from openly coercive maintenance strategies in designated areas (Gaeltacht) and obligatory Irish-medium schooling throughout the country, to a contemporary stance where the state sees Irish speakers as customers who require services. Policy for the majority Anglophone population is now based on a heritage role for Irish. Despite the evolution of state and community policies, some early ideological stances have remained at the core of decision-making. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the state has further reassessed its positions. The power of ideologically driven state language policy has inevitably produced mismatches which may paradoxically have further endangered the future of Irish as a community language. This chapter focuses on the stance of the monolingual English-speaking minority and inactive Irish speakers in Gaeltacht regions.

A TEOLOGIA CRISTÃ EM FACE DA FILOSOFIA CONTEMPORÂNEA

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (92) ◽  
pp. 359
Author(s):  
Lorenz B. Puntel
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Fundamental Unit ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Opposite Point ◽  
Theoretical Dimension

Este artigo examina os conceitos de teologia cristã e de filosofia contemporânea, mostra como se pode conceber uma unidade fundamental entre o que se costuma chamar de “teologia cristã” e “filosofia (cristã)” — filosofia e teologia representam duas perspectivas diferentes mas complementares com respeito a uma única dimensão teórica; as duas perspectivas abrangem os mesmos conteúdos, apenas vistos e articulados de dois pontos de vista exatamente opostos, mas ao mesmo tempo absolutamente complementares — e aponta para algumas exigências metódicas, conceituais e teóricas indispensáveis para o trabalho teológico (e filosófico).Abstract: This article examines the concepts of Christian theology and of contemporary philosophy. It shows how one can conceive a fundamental unit among defined Christian theology Christian philosophy. Philosophy and Theology represent two different but complementary perspectives with regard to an only theoretical dimension The two perspectives embrace the same contents, just seen and articulated of two exactly opposite point of view, but at the same time absolutely complementary. In addition, it points out to some indispensable methodical, conceptual and theoretical demands for the theological and philosophical work. 

L'homologue: Bataille et la récriture de soi

2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Cornille
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Excess Loss ◽  
The Core

It has often been said that Georges Bataille, in his fictional work, experimented with notions such as excess, loss and heterogeneity, notions which are at the core of his philosophical work. A closer look at two of his main narratives, Histoire de l'oeil (1928) and Le Bleu du ciel (1935), allows us to see parallels and repetitive structures that would hint at another tendency at work in his writing: a tendency towards homogenization of the narrative components concerned, in sharp contrast to the forces of heterogeneity.

scholarly journals The Three Levels of Law’s Goodness and then One More: Exploring John Finnis’s Account of Good Juridical Reasons for Action

2020 ◽  
pp. 521-552
Author(s):  
Petar Popović
Keyword(s):  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Discrete Level ◽  
The Core

The article revisits, in the first section, the core arguments of John Finnis’s account of law’s «goodness». Having established that the premises of these arguments are situated in Finnis’s theses on what constitutes good juridical reasons for action, and on law’s «double life», the three levels of law’s goodness are explored in detail. In the second section, the author argues that Aquinas’s juridical philosophy contains another discrete level of juridical goodness relevant to law. This level is then presented along with a critical assessment of its harmony with Finnis’s theory.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document