If I could get to the keystone of Hume's thought, I think it all rests on one sort of fundamental purported insight, which is roughly the insight that nothing has to do with anything else, unless by logical deduction, which are really at bottom just tricks of language. Everything is isolable and considerable as a completely atomized, free-floating substance with no non-logical connection to anything else. This, I think, sums up fairly Hume's entire epistemological and metaphysical output, and the influence of this picture on later thinkers is obvious. — The Great Whatever
The failure of logical deduction does not prevent him from constructing a philosophy that seeks to explain why we think of things as having to do with other things. — Sapientia
The point is, though, that he didn't. His philosophy ended with no account of personal identity or separation, continuity, or the coherence of any two ideas or impressions between each other. He gives several observations about mechanisms that seem to empirically govern certain things following or being associated with other things, but his own philosophy prevents him from giving any account of why these things should cause associations as they do. — The Great Whatever
To address just the first of those, he advanced the bundle theory of the self, which gives a sceptical account of personal identity. — Sapientia
In my view, the greatest thing about Hume was his awakening of the truly great Kant from "dogmatic slumbers". Sometimes a profoundly, brilliantly, wrong view propounded by one thinker may lead to a profoundly right view propounded by another. — John
Lately my love of Hume has been wearing off, he doesn't seem as impressive as he was, and I wonder why I was so taken with him. — The Great Whatever
But, that specific problem seems pretty far astray from your lament with Hume. Yours seems more general, in that Hume's account of knowledge is largely the product of analysis -- the breaking of categories and things and concepts into its constituent parts, as well as the sort of hammer-scourge which skepticism has on other kinds of questions or inferences which are not exactly certain or even close to certainty, but still worth considering and wondering about in a philosophical fashion. — Moliere
There is a sense in which Hume concludes that one cannot really think about anything. — The Great Whatever
eah, Kant always seemed to me to be engaged in a purely apologetic exercise that went nowhere. I was never taken in by him. — The Great Whatever
Let me be a necromancer for once and raise this thread from the dead.But your typical young philosophers, or typical people say on a philosophy forum, are not going to be sensitive to these sorts of deeper and more subtle connections between things, because they're still infatuated with Hume. And so they're more likely to play word games with the categories rather than try to explain, or even wonder, why these connections might hold. Hume's world-view leads only to logic-chopping and absolutely nothing else, and is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that once you assume everything is totally disparate from everything else, there's literally nothing to say about anything. — The Great Whatever
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