Re: Re: Hume & the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomois...

[JKSCHW@xxxxxxx]

This misreads Hume. Hume is not a radical individualist--quite unlike Hobbes,
who really does give us a world of atomic of atomic individuals bound
together only by contract. Hume's metaphysics is a mosaic of events that
merely happen together, but his social philosophy is genuinely social. Look
at his account of justice, where he makes fun of the very idea of a social
contract, and explains justice instead as a functional convention arising
from the needs of people for mutual accommodation given their
interdependence. The implications Hume drew from this were cionservative
rather than radical--Hume is a Burkean liberal who thinks we oughtn't go
around radically disturbing the conventions that have  arisen, but he favors
English liberty as it existed, more less, in his day, as a successful set of
conventions.

There's no particular reason to expect one's ontology and one's social
philosophy to mirror one another--only a premodern "great chain of being"
metaphysics would lead you to think that the structure of events as such
would be in any way like the structure of human relationships. So a "mosaic"
metaphysics doesn't imply an individualist social philosophy--or indeed, vice
versa. Hobbes was a strong believe in natural necessity and opposed the
corpuscularian new philosophy of Boyle and Newton.

--jks


In a message dated 9/10/00 12:19:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx writes:

<< (or a Robinson Crusoe, an abstract individual
 absolutely free from & autonomous of social relations) & the future
 is radically uncertain -- is a sign of the times:

. . . ..

 In the Humean universe, personal identities in particular &
 identities in general are fiction,

. . . .

 Hume himself, however, backed off from the most radical implications
 of his own philosophy: "We can form no wish which has not a reference
 to society" (_Treatise of Human Nature_).  And yet his pragmatic
 acceptance of what he thought of as dictates of nature & customs is
 at odds with the rest of his philosophy in which nothing is logically
 dependent for existence on anything else >>