All 16 Uses of
Hume
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- To follow Kant one must also understand something about the Scottish philosopher David Hume.†
Part 2 *David Hume = Scottish philosopher who restricted human knowledge to that which can be perceived by the senses (1711-1776)
- Hume had previously submitted that if one follows the strictest rules of logical induction and deduction from experience to determine the true nature of the world, one must arrive at certain conclusions.†
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- Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses.†
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- Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed.†
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- Hume's answer is "None.†
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- If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both "Nature" and "Nature's laws" are creations of our own imagination.†
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- This idea that the entire world is within one's own mind could be dismissed as absurd if Hume had just thrown it out for speculation.†
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- To throw out Hume's conclusions was necessary, but unfortunately he had arrived at them in such a way that it was seemingly impossible to throw them out without abandoning empirical reason itself and retiring into some medieval predecessor of empirical reason.†
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- Thus it was Hume, Kant said, who "aroused me from my dogmatic slumbers" and caused him to write what is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical treatises ever written, the Critique of Pure Reason, often the subject of an entire University course.†
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- He starts out at first along the path that Hume has set before him.†
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- As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume's path leads to and proceeds on an entirely new and different path of his own.†
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- Hume has been saying, in effect, that everything I know about this motorcycle comes to me through my senses.†
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- If I answer that metal's hard and shiny and cold to the touch and deforms without breaking under blows from a harder material, Hume says those are all sights and sounds and touch.†
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- Hume's motorcycle, the one that makes no sense at all, will occur if our previous hypothetical bed patient, the one who has no senses at all, is suddenly, for one second only, exposed to the sense data of a motorcycle, then deprived of his senses again.†
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- Now, I think, in his mind he would have a Hume motorcycle, which provides him with no evidence whatsoever for such concepts as causation.†
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- This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in "common sense" language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid.†
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Definitions:
-
(1)
(Hume as in: David Hume) Scottish philosopher who restricted human knowledge to that which can be perceived by the senses (1711-1776)
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Much less commonly, Hume can refer to other people, places, and things with that name.